USB Enjoys a Second Coming … of Sorts

Home Office Computing, Nov, 1999 by John Dickinson

I wasn't surprised when the PR rep from Corex called to say a new version of the company's nifty CardScan business card scanner was on the way--it was about due, after all. Nor was I surprised to find that the new scanner and software have some neat features that make them even easier to use.

What did surprise me was its support for USB.

A year ago I wouldn't have been surprised. Then, USB was still being touted as the technology that would clean up the wire mess around PCs, and put an end to IRQ and I/O address conflicts, parallel-port wars, and driver software conflicts once and for all. But that didn't happen. Instead, vendors of printers, modems, mice, keyboards, digital cameras, scanners, Ethernet adapters, and any other sort of peripheral you can name have all ignored USB like it was the second coming of the Great Plague.

Why? I really don't know, except to paraphrase what one Hewlett-Packard product manager remarked: Why go to USB when we've finally stabilized this crazy PC environment?

Although this is an exaggeration--just ask anyone who's tried to attach an HP printer or multifunction device to a pass-through parallel-port connector--there is some truth in the notion that much of the peripheral world works just fine, thank you. And even though you can attach almost everything outside the PC box to the USB port--and multi-USB-port hub connectors--it's unclear what the advantages really are. The wire mess will remain the wire mess, and driver conflicts are bound to appear sooner rather than later. And even though it might turn out to be cheaper to buy USB devices in the long run, the cost of developing them has yet to be borne or amortized.

USB is fine technology; I'm happy products like the CardScan are appearing on the scene, but I expect to see only a handful of USB peripherals by Christmas. (ViewSonic recently showed me a fine LCD flat-panel display with a USB hub, by the way.) But if the reason USB never picks up speed is because our peripherals and computers are working well together, that's okay with me, too.