MS wrote:

"Lon Stowell" wrote in message
...

Why then, have there been fewer and fewer PC card peripherals in recent
years, superseded by USB (1.1) peripherals?

The false assumption is that this is the case. USB 1.1 is good
only for low end slow speed peripherals...a rather large set of
them. USB 2, FireWire, Infiniband, FiberChannel are still
used for higher transfer rates.


Yes, of course USB 2 and Firewire are much faster than USB 1.1. (I haven't
even heard of the 3rd and 4th protocols you mention.) USB 2 just came out,
so not many peripherals for it yet. I assume that within a few years, it
will have completely superseded USB 1.1 (while retaining backward
compatibility). Not so many people have Firewire, and the other two you
mention must be pretty rare.

PCMCIA, on the other hand, exists on practically all notebook computers, and
was present long before any kind of USB. Most external devices for notebooks
used to be PCMCIA, and now most seem to be USB (at this point, still much
more 1.1 than 2). Therefore, I'm surprised to read that PCMCIA is much
faster than USB, even faster than USB 2, as it's a much older protocol, for
which there are fewer peripherals available these days.

CardBus is not PC Card. PC Card is very slow like ISA bus. CardBus is
fast like PCI bus, around 1 gigabit/second. They use the same pins and
look similar. CardBus cards won't fit in a PC Card socket but PC Cards
will fit in a CardBus socket since the newer bridge actually has two
separate bridges, one PC Card to ISA and one CardBus to PCI -- it uses
the appropriate one.