why would anyone buy a usb mouse or keyboard when ps/2 will do the same job without the driver issues. is there any real atvantage to usb input devices? ps/2 is fast enough and can handle a key pad and full size keyboard. is it the hotkeys that make them desirable? i really hate usb as an interface. its so tweaky and fucked up on driver issues that i wonder why it was released at all.

[end of rant]

i think that people just hte idea of usb, no other reason. the only advantage of usb is the speed; but that doesnt matter for a keyboard or mouse.

Universal serial bus.

ya that too

thats a nice title but ps/2 is virtualy universal as well. argueably more universal than than usb with its shitty drivers. ps/2 works on nix and windows regaurdless of the device. i dont know about mac but i think it works on macs as well.

as i recall only the more recent macs are ps/2 compatible (i may be wrong) but virtualy every system now is usb compatible.

here is somthing really weird, my moms old comp has 2 usb ports on it but it is runnung windows 95! windows 95 does not have usb support, in order to use it we had to upgrade to 98. later we called pacard bell and asked why this had happened, they had no logical reason.

since ps2 is old and its easy to have a plentiful amount of usbs on your system, its easier just to use those.

i can explain the usb thing. at the time of windows 95 there was a lot of hype over usb and people knew it would be supported under 98. by integrating usb in 95boxes you fullfill two purposes. add a feature to the sales pitch and increase the probability of a person upgrading to 98. by adding these ports the company may have goten a slight discout on MS programs to bundle with the box. my toshiba 300ct was a win 95 laptop but has usb. i bought it used and 98se was installed already. if you download a manual it will say this comp is usb ready. its just a sales pitch like tv's are hdtv ready, the only catch is you have to buy $800 and up converter boxes. same idea here with usb.

The goal of the developers of USB was to create a common "plug" that would not only be fast enough to handle devices other than a keyboard or mouse -- like a printer or scanner for example -- but also universal enough so that it would make the lives of hardware designers easier. After all USB was designed by hardware designers... USB offers a common bus architecture that allows a printer to be useable on a PC as well as a Mac, for example. One printer can be made and shipped making the whole thing cheaper to produce. Also, having computers with USB saturated in the market provides a platform for many novelty devices to launch from. Say... Those stupid game things as well as any number of dynamic input devices (force feedback?).

Whether or not the interface is the greatest is another issue. I thought my first post covered the point but oh well.

And since when has "fucked up on driver issues" ever stopped the industry from releasing a standard?

the drivers have never stoped an idustry move. i have no beef against usb in general but for mice and keyboards it seriously pisses me off. the question was directed at people who use the devices. i know what the industry motivation was. and besides that usb KB's and mice have only been popular in the last couple of years. it wasnt the original purpose of usb's introduction. usb was meant to be fast, which it was in the begining. if you wanted faster you would have to pay out the ass for scsi. i just dont see why a person would buy a usb KB unless they dont know any better.

Well... I don't think they would.

I think they are trying to phase out serial ports entirely. And make all periphals on a common USB bus. I see no problem hooking up printers, keyboards, mouses, webcams, etc, to USB ports. I will start to have massive heart attacks when they come out with USB hard disks, and ethernet interfaces.

like i said before usb is great for some things but it sucks for KB's. they common port argument may be true but i dont buy it. i think its just a way to sell new products that you dont need.

on another note i like usb hard disks. they serve a vital purpose. many buiness useres and computer illiterates need large scale back ups but dont know about removable hard drives or fear that they are too fragile. its slow but an overnight back up of 20 gigs is reasonable. its also very convenient and cheap for laptops to add mass starage.

usb ethernet makes me cringe. too unreliable for me to trust a network to. if its laptops then use pcmcia. i love that bus. it is by far my favorite of any interface ever invented. its fast and easy to use, hell its practicly mac level. no manual driver install or any shit to slow down the average user. and they are hot swapable.

thank you syphon, d0m, soullace, and z3m. my quest has been fufilled

quote:

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Originally posted by soullace:
I will start to have massive heart attacks when they come out with USB hard disks, and ethernet interfaces.

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You must have died at the 2000 ComDex, huh?

quote:

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Originally posted by syphon detonator:
i think its just a way to sell new products that you dont need.

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*ahem*

DUH!

"You must have died at the 2000 ComDex, huh?"

Lol, thats almost died. I had my heart attack but luckly i feel onto a high voltage power line that zapped me back to life :]


"like i said before usb is great for some things but it sucks for KB's."

I don't see how they suck for KB's and mices. They are just different.

"they common port argument may be true but i dont buy it. i think its just a way to sell new products that you dont need."

Exactly. The industry does this all of the time. I can see however how USB will allow them to phase out serial and parallel ports. Rather this is a good idea or not i am not sure.

"on another note i like usb hard disks. they serve a vital purpose."

Firewire my friend. It's faster and has practially the same type of adapter. There is no reason why you should have a FUCKEN hard disk on a SLOW serial wire. Firewire is a lot faster, and has all of the advantages of USB for hard disks.

Firewire my friend. It's faster and has practially the same type of adapter. There is no reason why you should have a FUCKEN hard disk on a SLOW serial wire. Firewire is a lot faster, and has all of the advantages of USB for hard disk

thats true but not everyone has firewire. actually a minority of people have firewire. meanwhile almost any laptop since 95 and some earlier have usb. in a perfect world we would all be using scsi or firewire but i for one would rather use usb than buy a firewire adaptpter card for my laptop. also aside from that only fire wire has built in power.iEEEE1394 needs a wall plug to function.

Didn't read through all the posts but wanted to contributed my two cents. Factually speaking, there were only a couple of Mac motherboards designed to use Apple Desktop Bus(ADB) and PS/2 peripherals. Pretty sweet deal if you like both Macs and PCs; they were all Alchemy and Tanzania(1 or 2, I forget) motherboards and I've only seen them on powercomputing computers. Its always been possible to use an adapter to put a PS/2 keyboard/mouse onto an ADB port but Macs no longer ship with ADB so thats not so much of a problem.

The idea of USB is pretty straight forward: create a standard for peripherals that really is plug and play. The earliest USB devices were like this and great; a USB disk drive was plug and play and hot swappable, same for burners, hard disks, flash media, and a panoply of other devices that seemed like good ideas at the time. The thing is USB is pretty weak, in terms of power and in terms of bandwidth. People thought it was cool at first how you could daisy chain hubs and devices til you had the number of ports you needed and without any ID conflicts but the reality of it was that a lot of devices either sucked up most of the power originating from the USB port or required extra power cables, requiring more wires and making things more complicated. Then, hardware makers decided that their devices were special enough to require drivers of their own, creating their own problems. Guess the point of that history was to show that USB began as a pretty bright idea for simplifying things and has evolved into just another semicomplicated standard with ID conflicts, driver conflicts, power conflicts, and not a fast enough data rate. Supposedly USB 2.0 should fix the power and data rate problems but I guarantee that more driver and ID conflicts will occur with it. Someone also mentioned how USB 2.0 is around to get people to buy more computers or hardware; thats probably true too. But a 480 Mbps data rate(I think thats it...) is more than fast enough for a lot of devices.

Kind of addressing the use of USB keyboards and mice, have any of you ever used a computer in a really bad location to get at the back? Either in some kind of a rack or maybe under a cramped desk? Probably. USB, done right hopefully in 2.0, should make it so you can plug that portable hard disk into your keyboard hub, saving you the inconvenience of reaching down. The principal idea behind USB was to simplify everything. By only using USB cables instead of serial and PS/2 parallel cables, things can be much more plug and play. Additionally, USB is supposed to be able to provide more power to devices. Isn't it easier to only have one cable for a device, for both data and power?

On another note, isn't firewire just Apple's marketing name for IEEE-1394? Apple's Yosemite G3s(the Blue and White desktops) were the first computers that featured firewire. I think 1394 carrys electrical power too, at least I'm about 99% certain that i've seen an iPod charging on a vaio. IEEE is just kind of a standards institute for new electrical devices.

um, one last thing. Anyone seen the new truly wireless keyboards? The ones that you just place near your computer to charge? Anyone have any idea how that is done? I read an old slashdot post speculating that they work kind of like microwaves, getting some kind of molecules to vibrate, which produces kinetic energy, which is somehow stored as potential energy. The post was from like 3 weeks back, anyone else read it? It would be cool to find out how to charge a battery wirelessly...

Well don't you just apply current over the terminals of a battery to recharge it? You can induce current using a certain frequency, in which you filter and convert into DC running this current across the battery. This is my best guess on how its done.

i have a usb mouse, hell all i did was plug it in and it started working. USB is the sheeot