Why no Nubus USB card?

[albrightct]

I'm curious why there was never any Nubus card with USB ports. The imac came out in 1998, which means that it was less than three years since the top of the line mac was the 8100. At that time there must have still been a HUGE installed base of nubus macs which were still absolutely relevant professionally. Why didn't anyone ever make a card for them? There are tons of way more specialized products like CPU upgrades for the L2 Cache of one specific model that came to market, why did companies like Newer pass on making a USB card for nubus?

Is there any technical reason? I know there are ultra scsi cards for nubus so it can't be a bandwidth thing.

 

[Unknown_K]

There are fast wide SCSI cards for Nubus , not ultra wide (limited to 20MB/sec I think).

Imacs came with a special version of OS 8.6 , most users had OS 7.x on the old Nubus PPC macs. USB was designed for PCI machines not Nubus.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Correction: USB was supported by Apple for the PCI Architecture, but not the older NuBus Architecture. It was an open standard designed for use by ANY computer, just like SCSI.

There's no technical reason Apple couldn't provide support for it for the older NuBus Architecture. But they wanted people to buy new Macs, not hold onto the old ones a generation out of date! You can't really blame them, they were and are in the business of selling newer, better, faster just like any other company.

USB is pretty much the same I/O model as ADB, it's just designed as a better general purpose peripheral bus as opposed to the underspeed, underpowered KBD/Pointing Device oriented ADB.

Hot plugging and seemingly unlimited addressing capability is pretty high up on the better'n ADB list as well.

 

[albrightct]

So it's basically that apple never wrote drivers for USB that supported the nubus architecture, or is it that the OS required for USB support wouldn't run on the Nubus Powermacs/quadras?

I just think it's really strange that a top of the line machine as of august 1995 wouldn't be supported by SOME company that would write drivers for it and produce an expansion card offering it seeing as how USB became popular less than three years later. I get why apple wanted people to replace rather than upgrade, fair enough, but where was the third party support? Like I said a lot of really really specific low volume upgrades like G3 cards for machine specific L2 cache slots and I think i remember some kinda weird bolt-on 3DFX card for the original imac that wasn't s'poseda be upgradable. Nobody thought they could turn a profit on a USB card for nubus?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

It's a lot lower level than drivers, without a foundation in the OS, you can't build a driver. There is a slight crossover where Mac OS runs on both NuBus and PCI architectures where USB runs on one and not the other, but probably not enough Macs to support a viable product even if it were possible.

USB took a little while to achieve ubiquity and there weren't all that many killer products available like Keychain Drives by the time NuBus Macs became wholly obsolete.

 

[waynestewart]

Probably a perceived lack of demand. Nubus Mac owners already had a mouse & keyboard. SCSI scanners were faster. A large portion of the printers that had USB also had a serial port.

The demand was there for PCI macs but USB cards for those were cheap and no one needed to design one specially for the Mac.

 

[Bunsen]

It was - and probably still is - more common for people to upgrade their computer and keep their old peripherals than the other way round - hence things like USB to SCSI converters, USB-serial, USB-ADB and so forth. If you had money sunk into a good quality SCSI scanner, it was worthwhile to spend $100 or so on a converter to connect it to your shiny new iMac.