On Sun, 10 Jan 1999, John Nemeth wrote:

	This is an excessively negative and partially inaccurate response.  

//      This represents one of my beefs with the way Apple is currently
// doing things.  They seem to be telling people to throw away their old
// peripherals and media (no floppy drive on iMac), and buy all new
// stuff, use new procedures, etc.  This is marketing at its worse.
[...]

	Frankly, I'm getting really sick of backward compatibility.  I
don't *want* floppies around anymore.  If you want portable media, get a
zip drive or something on the machine.  There's a USB version of the zip
drive available.  Things are bigger now, floppies don't make a lot of
sense.  If floppies *are* that important, someone will make a USB floppy
drive.

	Vendors already spend *way* too much effort trying to remain
compatible with 5+ year old designs that just aren't necessary anymore.
Buying a new computer should be exactly that.

//      Although, I don't like it, since SCSI is still way better then
// the competition, this appears to be the way things are going.  Even
// Sun has IDE/USB on their entry level workstations (UGH!!!).  
// However, for the most part, higher end machines and power users
// still use SCSI exclusively.

	I do believe this was a failure in the iMac.  USB is not a
replacement for SCSI, but for peripherals like scanners, etc... it does
make a little more sense.  I was kinda sad about not being able to hook my
scanner up to an iMac when I get one, but Best Buy supposedly has a deal
that comes with the USB version of my scanner for a kilodollar (too bad
the nearest one is in Marin, ugh).  I hate IDE disks, though.

// } conveniently forgotten that the "I" in "RAID" stands for "inexpensive."
// 
//      I've never seen inexpensive RAID solutions that are worth
// using. I don't consider software RAID to be worth using.  RAID
// definitely has its place, but its not inexpensive.

	It's Inexpensive Disks, not Inexpensive Arrays.  The disks should
be cheap regardless of the cost of building an array and something to
control them. I think this is why people have made IDE RAIDs.

//      Although ethernet is definitely the way to go, there are still
// a lot of old Macs out there running on localtalk that people would
// like to have access to their new machines.  Not to mention all the
// localtalk only printers.

	Aren't there localtalk to ethertalk bridges?  That seems like
enough compatibility to me.

//      Yep.  Yet, another example of "let's make money selling them
// all new peripherals; the suckers will think they're getting a
// bargain with the lower system prices; fools."

	As opposed to MS, ``Let's make money selling them old technology
relabeled as we attempt to hold computing back to when we understood it.''

//      Oh boy, another bus to support.  I guess the big question is
// when will other companies start adopting it.  And, how soon is it
// going to become really popular.  USB was pretty much forced on the
// consumer market in the last year in a big way.  But, at this point,
// I don't see anything that would force people to adopt FireWire.

	Heh, I do.  It's going to be funny when people try to run
*everything* off of USB, at the same time, and realize it's just not fast
enough.  The S (whichever version of it you look at) is really the
limiting factor.  It's fast enough for any random peripheral, but when you
take three or four medium-high bandwidth devices and try to use them all
at the same time, there are going to be problems.  This is where the
FireWire ads come in.

	I'm excited about USB as a common interface for peripherals (as
opposed to proprietary interfaces that only work on Windows PCs or weird
uses of the parallel port on PC hardware), but I'm a little concerned
that people might go crazy and try to run too many devices off of it.

--
Principle Member Technical Staff, beyond.com    The world is watching America,
pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings <dustin@spy.net>
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