William Sommerwerck wrote:
Isn't it sad all this garbage is needed to send 5 volts down a cable?

I've seen the USB 2.0 specs, and they're beyond unbelievable. You'd think
what appears to be a simple interface would take only ten pages or so to
define, but it takes 10 or 20 times that.

USB might be "over-defined", but at least it works. I can't think of a USB
product I've owned that didn't work correctly. From my point of view, this
is not an accident. Somebody did a lot of thinking to make sure there
weren't any "gotchas" in the system specification.

almost the first 10 years of USB were complete crap.

every chipset for it was buggy (even big name ones like intel), it was
slow, and devices other than a mouse were really pushing it. OS support
was junk too.

My favorite knockout combination was Windows 98 on a Hitachi laptop. There
was no chance in hell anything USB would ever work on that combo.

I had some digital camera with USB 1 or 1.1. it was actually slower than
using the irDA port on the camera, which was emulating 115kb serial. yes,
an LED and photodiode behind some plastic window emulating a 1960s method
of connecting teletypes to furniture sized computers blew away the mess
known as USB.

these days, usb mostly works. It's still obnoxious when devices can't
handle being moved between ports though, which is proof USB or everybody
that writes device drivers are completely stupid.

Does moving a scannwe between my front and rear USB port really require a
driver reinstallation? WTF?