5 May
2012
5 May
'12
8:55 p.m.
On May 5, 2012, at 11:21 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
There used to be a time when some Mac fanatics would
claim that the Mac
was a "better machine" because EVERY OEM peripheral available for it (both
of them) would "just work", whereas the thousands of third party
peripherals available for PC would require cabling and drivers.
Having been a Mac user for a long, long time, I'll admit that that's
because the selection of devices available for the Mac was rather
constrained. Yeah, anything that looked like a SCSI disk would "just
work", just like anything that looks like USB Mass Storage will "just
work" on any platform that even pretends to support USB. SCSI
scanners, on the other hand, were always subject to the whims of
device manufacturers; USB has made it neither better nor worse.
I'm glad that digital cameras settled rather quickly on the sane idea
of presenting themselves as USB Mass Storage, at least (since, at the
base level, they're just acting as memory card storage adaptors).
That would have been possible with SCSI, but who wants to hook up
SCSI to a digital camera? Instead, you ended up with weird
proprietary solutions over serial (e.g. Apple's QuickTake) or oddball
devices like the Sony Mavica, which had the floppy drive built in.
And, of course, with SCSI you needed some sort of intelligent device
on both ends for managing the transactions. Obviously, this has
nothing to do with keyboards or mice, which could be left well enough
alone (the fact that the PS/2 port persists on most PC motherboards
is a testament to the fact that it's not a bad idea), but it is nice
to at least have keyboards and mice that can plug into the same port
that every other device plugs into.
Mandating it, of course, seems silly. I'll cop to that. I'm still
using an ADB keyboard through a USB adaptor (ADB, of course, does
require some level of intelligence in the device, though really not
a whole lot more than a PS/2 keyboard).
- Dave