Re: CFFA Card memory cards on sale at Sears

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Paul R. Santa-Maria wrote:

>brad wrote:
>> (still want a usb card to work on a gs....just a simple little card i could
>> plug a usb card into...if one of you guys could just whip one of those out
>
>My understanding is that USB is processor-intensive.
>If so, an Apple IIgs USB card may be impossible.

This would certainly be the case for a "direct" implementation,
but, for all practical purposes, there are no such implementations.

All current USB interfaces have on-chip microcontrollers to handle
configuration and bus transactions, together with SRAM FIFOs.
This is quite similar to modern Ethernet implementations.

And it has the effect of putting about 20 times as much processing
power in the inerface chip as there is in the Apple II itself!

Dog...tail...wag.  ;-)

Of course, the real issue is the difficulty of writing an Apple II
driver to control something connected to the USB interface.

-michael

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