I don't see the contradiction. I said I couldn't see them disappearing.
Not the they would remain prevalent.
I think it will take at least another hw generation for USB to replace
them in industrial and legacy applications.
The software and hardware requirements in a lot of these applications are
pretty static. One major controls
company only recently transitioned off of OS/2 on the PC controllers. And
in that case it wasn't because it
couldn't do the job, but because of IBM's dropping of support. It's like
that, until legacy ports are dropped by
the applications using them in these applications, people will continue
to use them.


  ----- Original Message -----
  From: "Gerhard Fiedler"
  To: piclist@mit.edu
  Subject: Re: [PIC] Why the preoccupation with bus powered
  programmers?
  Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 08:24:33 -0200


  tachyon_1@email.com wrote:
  > As for PAR/SER dissappearing, I highly doubt it. It might be going
  away
  > on the kind of crap I won't buy anyway (ie DELL, eMachines, etc.
  > consumer desktops) but there's no way in heck they'll get rid of it
  > anytime soon. There's just way too much demand from business
  customers
  > with legacy connectivity needs. Especially in industrial,
  manufacturing,
  > and production companies. In fact a friend of mine makes a nice
  living
  > selling add on PCI PAR/SER boards to make up the demand for
  customers
  > who require them.

  The second part of this paragraph seems to contradict the first part.
  If
  people make a nice living selling parallel/serial add-on boards,
  that's
  probably at least partly because these ports are going away in the
  normal
  computer systems.

  When there's only 10% of customers left that wants/needs them, you're
  starting to find more and more motherboards (including good ones)
  that
  don't have them anymore. And more and more of the people who need
  them will
  use add-ons (PCI, USB). Which makes sense to me, even though that
  makes
  these ports more expensive.

  Gerhard

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