Re: [cobalt-users] Re: USB drive on Raq4

[Lyle Scheer <lyle.scheer@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 19:19, Thom LaCosta wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Bruce Timberlake wrote:
> 
> > The USB ports were added to all the appliances thinking that someday support
> > would be added... ended up being more of a tease than anything
> 
> And then Sun bought the product line and we moved from tease to something
> else.

I'd actually rephrase what Bruce said a little...

The chips we were using had USB functionality included among other
functionality, but were not selected because we wanted to design with
USB.

Linux at the time did not yet support USB, but there were plans for the
linux kernel to support it.

To run the USB signal to the edge of the board required one trace on the
PCBA, and we had the space, so we ran it.

The connector cost something like five cents, so we added it in case it
turned out to be useful.

There were never any design intentions to use it, but it was cheap
enough to say, why not?  There were some folks at the time who said, "if
we put this in, customers might expect us to do something with it, so we
shouldn't put it in."  However, the, "it's cheap, let's put it in
anyway" group won the day.

- Lyle