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Warp <war### [at] tag povrayorg> wrote:
> Neeum Zawan <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote:
> > Never knew what the benefit of a USB keyboard was...
>
> Try hot-swapping a PS/2 keyboard and you'll see the benefit.
The actual benefits are more in that...:
(1) You don't have gazillions of different connectors.
Imagine that in addition to FireWire and eSATA for external bulk memory devices,
network connector for network (of course), DVI and HDMI for display, and
what-have-you-not, you still needed the good old PS/2 for the keyboard, another
(don't mix them up!) for the mouse, parallel port for the printer and EEPROM
flasher and dongles and what-have-you-not, the Gameport for joysticks and MIDI,
and last not least RS232 for the modem and diverse like chip-card readers and
stuff alike.
PS/2 is just two connectors to get rid of, but what sense would it make to
introduce a "universal" peripherals interface to replace a host of other
connectors, but stick with the old ones for keyboard and mouse?
(2) You can have multiple keyboards at once, and/or keyboars with non-standard
keys.
Like, for instance, those nifty multimedia keys. Or one of these beasts, for
that matter:
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=393741
(Yes, they did similar with PS/2, most notably for joysticks with gazillions of
buttons and switches; but would two of such products from different vendors be
compatible with one another?)
(3) The keyboard can double-feature as a hub to connect other periphery to, like
USB sticks for instance.
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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> > How often a day do you do that on your desktop computer? :P
>
> Not often with the keyboard, but I often swap my USB mouse between
> my desktop computer and my work laptop. An old PS/2 mouse couldn't be
> used like that (and not only because the laptop as no PS/2 port).
Hum... I guess other people would buy another mouse, right? :P
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clipka wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> I just booted a Windows 98 rescue floppy burned onto a DVD on a USB keyboard
>> on an x64 machine with 6G of RAM. Worked well enough to bring up a DOS
>> prompt and "more readme.txt" worked, so it can't be *too* hard.
>
> Yeah, Windows 98 did come with integrated USB support already.
This was the rescue disk, which was basically an MS-DOS disk. You got a
command prompt so you could run chkdsk and fdisk. No extra drivers.
Now, it's possible the BIOS is taking the USB and putting it out to the
appropriate BIOS calls. I suspect that's what "legacy USB emulation" means
in the BIOS settings.
> I wouldn't expect MS-DOS 6.0 (for instance) to do the same stunt.
There were no graphics or mouse or anything involved. Since the topic was
the complexity of graphics programming, I just checked to see if the command
line came up and ran.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
back to version 1.0."
"We've done that already. We call it 2.0."
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Neeum Zawan wrote:
> PS/2 (or whatever it's called).
Yes. PS/2 is the little DIN plug. Anyone still have one of the full-size
DIN plugs they used before that?
> In any case, aren't there adapters to convert USB to PS/2?
Sort of. It's more like some keyboards are built to recognise that plug
being on there and switch to sending PS/2 signals. You can't take every USB
keyboard and use it with the adaptor.
> Never knew what the benefit of a USB keyboard was...
You can have more than one, you can put it on a hub, you can hot plug it
between machines, and you need less driver software to use it from scratch
assuming someone already gave you a USB driver.
For the average desktop user? Not a whole lot.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
back to version 1.0."
"We've done that already. We call it 2.0."
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clipka <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Yeah, Windows 98 did come with integrated USB support already.
Mostly useless, though. If you connect eg. a USB mouse to a Win98 system,
chances are that it won't work. (You have to install some driver.)
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Neeum Zawan wrote:
> > PS/2 (or whatever it's called).
> Yes. PS/2 is the little DIN plug. Anyone still have one of the full-size
> DIN plugs they used before that?
My keyboard is so old that it has one of the big plugs. I have to use an
adaptor to connect it to a modern PS/2 connector.
--
- Warp
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Warp wrote:
> My keyboard is so old that it has one of the big plugs. I have to use an
> adaptor to connect it to a modern PS/2 connector.
Yeah, I have one of those left too, but I don't use it any more.
I recently spilled on my usual keyboard, so I switched to another I had
sitting around. I hadn't realized how much I touchtype even things like
"home" and "end" and "page down". For several days I was hitting "insert"
instead of "home" because the block of keys is across instead of down on
this one.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
back to version 1.0."
"We've done that already. We call it 2.0."
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David H. Burns wrote:
> Well, exasperated, I'm willing to admit it: Graphics programming in
> Windows is complicated, too complicated to bother with it appears to me.
This is why I use OpenGL for graphics.
Regards,
John
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On 08/01/09 10:08, Warp wrote:
> Not often with the keyboard, but I often swap my USB mouse between
> my desktop computer and my work laptop. An old PS/2 mouse couldn't be
> used like that (and not only because the laptop as no PS/2 port).
I'm not understanding why.
I've tried this on Linux on my office machine, and it worked just fine.
The problem usually is that if you load X without the mouse plugged in,
then you'll need to reload X to get the mouse working. However, if you
loaded X with the mouse, and then switch the mouse in the same session,
it works fine.
--
Kotter: "Have you ever considered becoming a vet?"
Epstein: "Uh...Uh no. My brother Sanchez was in the army. Didn't like it
a bit."
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On 08/01/09 10:27, clipka wrote:
> PS/2 is just two connectors to get rid of, but what sense would it make to
> introduce a "universal" peripherals interface to replace a host of other
> connectors, but stick with the old ones for keyboard and mouse?
So in other words, it's merely for manufacturer convenience?
> (2) You can have multiple keyboards at once, and/or keyboars with non-standard
> keys.
>
> Like, for instance, those nifty multimedia keys. Or one of these beasts, for
> that matter:
USB is not needed to get those multimedia keys. My keyboard is PS/2 and
it has them.
I suppose if I think really hard, I'll come up with a need for more
than one keyboard...
> (3) The keyboard can double-feature as a hub to connect other periphery to, like
> USB sticks for instance.
True, but that usage seems rare. I can't recall seeing a keyboard that
had this - although I don't doubt their existence.
--
Kotter: "Have you ever considered becoming a vet?"
Epstein: "Uh...Uh no. My brother Sanchez was in the army. Didn't like it
a bit."
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