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Sci Tech
Come (plug and) play with me!
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Connecting multiple peripherals to a PC just became easier and faster. Two competing standards: USB 2.0 and FireWire, will shortly offer zippy new options to the slow serial interface. Anand Parthasarathy checks out the contenders, whohave not yet decided whether they should compete or co-exist.
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BACK IN the Jurassic Age of computer technology the 1960s — interfaces between the mother PC and its peripheral devices were established through serial ports which exchanged data at speeds of around 20 kilobits per second (KBPS).
In 1981— roughly when the IBM PC first appeared — the parallel port surfaced: sending the data bits along 8 parallel streams and kicking up transfer rates to what was then a dizzy 1.2 megabits per second (MBPS). The parallel port was the preferred route for most printers and incredibly, most of us still use this 20-year old technology (and speed) to connect PC and printer.
In the mid 1980s, the SCSI ( pronounced skuzzy) port appeared, kicking up speeds 30-fold to 40 MBPS. It had a useful feature — daisy chaining.
This meant that you could for example, connect a scanner to a PC and a printer to the scanner and so on, thus latching on multiple peripherals to a single parallel port.
The PC port scenario remained constant for another decade or more and we lived ( as we still do) with the hassle of having a confusing array of non-compatible sockets on the back plane of the PC one for the keyboard, another for the printer, a third for the modem, a fourth for the mouse and so on.
In 1995 two competing new technologies offered a new feature, plug and play you could connect a new peripheral and start using it immediately without having to install special software or even rebooting the PC.
One was the Universal Serial Bus (USB) which boasted a ten-fold speed hike over the parallel port — to 12 MBPS. The other was known by its code number, IEEE 1394, but users soon knew it by the name Fire Wire. This offered an awesome leap over all currently available transfer speeds 400 MBPS.
Apple Computers, makers of the Macintosh PC and its successors, cannily latched on to the new Fire Wire standard and made it the default built- in interface in all machines after the iMac G4 which came in 1998.
However Apple PCs have always carried a full slate of other ports including Ethernet, and wireless standards like Blue Tooth and 802.11b. And in a shrewd instance of having your cake and eating it too, Apple Mac users also found a USB port on the back of their PCs. The company smartly leveraged its Fire Wire advantage to make the Mac, the preferred platform for high speed video and picture editing work, where a 400 MBPS speed made it by far, the fastest platform for such multimedia professional work.
The USB, meanwhile languished till Microsoft built support for the USB 1.1 standard into the Windows 98 operating system. In the last 3-4 years, new IBM-type PCs have tended to offer 2 to 4 USB ports.
Last year, the USB standard was upgraded to USB 2.0, which offered a steep speed increase to 480 MBPS. Windows XP extended support to the new USB version. PCs with USB 2.0 ports are only now appearing in the global PC market. For most of us this has not made much of a difference because our PCs still carry the baggage of the legacy interfaces and use mouse and keyboard, which require unique sockets.
And since we in India don't discard hardware so often, we tend to still use printers that need the old standard parallel interface. All that is set to change, very fast, to a new era when our PCs will have half a dozen identical sockets on the back and on the once size fits all principle, you can plug any peripheral into any hole and get on with the task.
Now, the crorepati question is: what type will these 6 or more identical sockets belong to: USB2.0 or Fire Wire (IEEE 1394)?
Speed wise, the two standards are almost head to head ( 400 MBPS versus 480 MBPS).
But Fire Wire has hitherto tended to be the slightly costlier option to install. However it has one technical edge over USB 2.0: the interface will work directly from one peripheral to another without requiring a PC in between, acting as a middle man. For example, you can download music files from an MP3 player or a digital camera directly to a storage device.
In the race to capture the PC socket, the makers of Fire Wire have announced that by year end, a new version (IEEE 1394.b) will allow transfers at twice the current speeds, that is 800 MBPS.
The ding dong battle is not restricted to jacking up speeds: after Microsoft decimated Netscape by throwing in Internet Explorer free, IT leaders have realized the powerful compulsion that a freebie can hold for the customer. So both sides have begun to play this game and these are the latest scores:
- Intel's new chip sets, 845G and 845 GL have built in capability to drive a USB 2.0 port. In other words, assemblers can offer USB ports essentially free, without having to pay for an additional chip on the motherboard. This is expected to ensure that almost all PCs with an Intel chip under the hood, typically a Pentium will sport USB 2.0 ports.
- On August 7, Apple ( the Godfather of Fire Wire, after it acquired the company that developed it, Zayante) announced that it was giving away free, the software development kit (SDK) that would allow other peripheral and device makers to add a Fire Wire port. This is a clever move: while USB 1.1 was still languishing, Fire Wire raced ahead and today over 60 million PCs worldwide only a minority of them — Apple machines — sport Fire Wire ports.
Now challenged by Intel's freebie USB 2.0 support, Apple hopes to woo device developers to design Fire Wire into their systems till the port emerges as an industry standard.
Who will win this War of the Ports? Dell demonstrated that with its latest USB-2-equipped PC, one could download 200 songs to an MP3 player in under 53 seconds. With USB 1.1, this took 10 minutes. Apple replied with a demo of its innovative iPod music player transferring a full CD from IMac PC to iPod in 10 seconds. None of us is going to complain if tomorrow, we are offered PCs which do these dizzying tasks and if that mess of socket holes on the back of the PC is replaced by a neat row of identical ports.
But will it happen? Many industry watchers are saying: Why are these two guys competing so aggressively when they should be cooperating to coexist? Let device makers build the interface that will get the best from the product, and let personal computers offer both types for now.
In recent weeks, the two sides have been chalking up success stories: The US-based PC Wave unveiled the world's smallest Wireless LAN adapter on August 13, a tiny device fitting in the palm of your hand that provides wireless connectivity to the PC. It plugs into a USB 2.0 socket.
The US Army too, has hitched its high tech plans for tomorrow's Digital Soldier, to the USB trail. The connected foot soldier of tomorrow will sport an antenna-helmet and a wearable computer that will be bristling with USB ports enabling him to attach a number of navigational and military sensors.
Fire Wire fans, meanwhile, are basking in the reflected glory of Hollywood where iMacs equipped with Fire Wire non linear editors, scanners and digital cameras are the bread and butter tools of the FX business.
As interested spectators, who have no money of our own at stake, but who only have a vital interest in future directions of personal technology, all we can say is: Let the shakeout begin!
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