Erik E. Fair writes:
 > I went to MacWorld this week. I note the following:
 > 
 > SCSI is dying; none of Apple's desktop systems have SCSI built-in
any more.

Apple's scsi was quite weak anyway.  8 bit scsi in a 16bit world.  The 
scsi card is available as a $50 option.

 > As the last really mass-market vendor selling systems SCSI built-in removes
 > support for it, SCSI disks will likely retreat to the high end - Ultra-Wide
 > 80 MB/s RAID applications, and will probably remain more expensive on a
 > cost per megabyte basis, justified by better performance than
 > IDE/EIDE/UltraDMA solutions.

Its only justified where multiple devices are concerned.  99.9995% of
the users will never notice a difference between a lame narrow drive
on a lame slow 8 bit controller or a dma/33 ide drive.

 Somehow, the RAID box vendors have
 > conveniently forgotten that the "I" in "RAID" stands for "inexpensive."
 >

As far as performance-per-dollar, is IS inexpensive.  Keep in mind
that inexpensive is a relative term.  Go price an SSA setup.
 
 > LocalTalk, Apple's 237 Kb/s RS-422 network wire, is dying - neither the
 > iMac or the G3 box have conventional serial ports that support it any more.
 > Ethernet supplants this (in fact, both boxes have 10/100 Ethernet
 > built-in). Bloody well about time, I say.

Agreed; Slowcaltalk was nice in 1991 - but things have advanced just a 
bit since then.

 > 
 > Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), Apple's keyboard/mouse/input device bus, is dying;
 > the iMac doesn't have it, and the new G3 "pro" system has one such port,
 > but it's clear that will probably disappear in the next model.

Last model I can place that actually had TWO adb ports was the color
classic.  Most mac models for the last several years have come with
one adb port, including the "higher end" models like 8x00 and 9x00.

 USB
 > supplants this. This is actually a good thing for everyone since USB seems
 > to be a better/faster standard for this kind of use, but it also means that
 > if you need spare parts, now is the time to buy.
 > 

The PC world ignored USB for years as identical peripherals are
available for use with standard serial ports and stuff.  It took some
dirty back-door dealings to get Apple to switch to USB.  But thats
another discussion.

 > With Apple's endorsement and Windows 98 supporting it, looks like USB is
 > really taking off. I saw scanners, disks, cameras, SCSI interfaces (!),
 > memory-disk modules, keyboards, mice, sketch-pads, lots of hubs, and so on,
 > all for USB.

Please keep in mind that none of thse so-called "pc peripherals" had
little if any  momentum before the iMac.

 NetBSD is in the right place at the right time with support
 > for this interface, but I bet we're going to have fat quirk tables, and
 > lots of drivers to write for specific devices.
 > 

But, much like other busses, once you know how to talk to the device
chipset itself, bus its on shouldnt be too big a problem.  The
problems you allude to are hardly insurmountable as the pcmcia bus was 
handled the same way "eg., a daemon to watch the ports and load a
driver as needed"


 > FireWire (IEEE 1394, 400Mb/s) is built-in to the new G3 box; expect the
 > peripheral market for this to heat up as these systems start shipping in
 > volume.
 > 
 > 	Erik <fair@clock.org>


Well, much like when the iMac started, there was what, one maybe two
usb peripherals?  Expect a little lag time between when these machines 
hit the street in any kind of numbers and the time that firewire
peripherals start showing up.

Also, this IS Apple Computer we're talking about and they have been
less than forthcoming on technical data in the past.  FWIW.