>
>> My biggest gripe is that the USB organization doesn't seem to care
>> about the little guys.
>
>
This is an exactly accurate statement.  The USB organization DOESN'T
care about the little guys.  It's probably not even part of their
charter to care about the little guys.  They serve the PC and PC
peripheral markets, and the user and support base of consumer personal
computers.  It's somewhat unfortunate that a side-effect is the loss
of legacy ports (especially serial) from PCs, but those were only
present "automatically" for a relatively brief time period.  You can
still add a PCI-based serial card, or a USB->serial converter to your
PC for no more than it cost to do so before the serial port became a
standard part of the PC chipsets.  Likewise parallel.
It's somewhat MORE unfortunate that embedded hardware suppliers are
finding it harder to lunch off the leavings of the PC peripheral market;
serial modems, or printers that can talk ascii, or barcode readers that
talk to PS2 or serial ports are increasingly hard to find.

BillW

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