[Coco] rant about ADB was Re: Odd cable

Dean Leiber adit at nationsdial.com
Wed Feb 29 03:20:55 EST 2012


On Feb 28, 2012, at 7:56 PM, Willard Goosey wrote:

> I've never been in love with ADB.  NM Tech's old Mac lab held Macs
> with incredibly flakey keyboards and mice and they completely ruined
> me for ADB.  USB is definitely an upgrade.  In fairness those Macs had
> been beat on hard.  I've got an '030 Mac now and ADB seems fairly
> stable on it.  

ADB was almost like a precursor to USB. I think in theory it was supposed
to be 'hot swappable' like USB but it didn't work out too well in practice.
Generally I never had much problem with it on any of the systems I had, but
then again I'm kinda gentle on my computers since I have to pay for repairs. :-D
And S-video cables made good replacement ADB cables (or vice versa) in a pinch.

It really isn't surprising that Apple dropped ADB in favor of USB since it
offered everything ADB did, wasn't proprietary (making parts cheaper) and
did the hot-swapping fairly reliably.  My favorite tho is the old apple floppy drives
that ejected the disk for you. :-D

Strangely I never had a real Mac. I had a PowerComputing Powercenter, Mactell (
4400 Clone) and a Umax Supermac (dual processor.. Oooohhh Ahhh :-D )

Dean




More information about the Coco mailing list