Why USB? What advantages does USB have over earlier connectivity standards?
The original answer published on August 17, 1998 follows: The primary advantage of USB over ADB, SCSI, and serial ports is that USB is a cross-platform standard. This makes devices for the iMac, and other modern Macs, just as cheap as devices for Windows-based PCs and creates a greater number and variety of choices. At 1.5 Mbps (Megabits per second) in low speed and 12.0 Mbps (Megabits per second) in high speed, USB is also faster than ADB and serial ports, running at 10k per second and 320k per second, respectively. USB is much slower than SCSI, which hits a top speed of 320 MB (Megabytes) per second, but USB does have the advantages of being “hot-swappable”, meaning you can hook up and disconnect devices while the computer is running. USB also supports up to 127 devices, and you don’t have to worry about ID conflicts that could sometimes trouble SCSI-based systems. Essentially, USB is designed to simplify the low-end Macintosh peripherals market consolidating ADB and serial devices i
