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USB
USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, an external bus specifiation with data transfer rates of up to 12 Mbps (which equals approximately 1MB/s).
USB offers many advantages over other external busses, such as serial ports, parallel ports, etc:
- Adding more than a couple devices to a PC via serial ports can cause hardware conflicts that are extremely frustrating to resolve. With USB, up to 127 devices can be connected to a single USB port without causing problems.
- Thanks to USB's Plug-and-Play and hot plugging capability, devices can be installed or unplugged while the system is running with no need to reboot the machine.
- USB's 1MB/s transfer rate is many times faster than serial or parallel data transfer performance.
- Most manufacturers have either already created perhipherals with USB support, or plan to do so. Everything from speakers, to printers, scanners, mice, keyboards, and external storage/backup drives, currently support USB.
In April 2000, the USB 2.0 Promotor group announced that the USB 2.0 specification had been finalized. USB 2.0 extends the speed of the USB's perhipheral to PC connection from 12Mbps to up to 480Mbps. Several USB 2.0 products debuted at Comdex Fall 2000 and should hit the shelves in late 2000 or early 2001.
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