Re: [NTLK] Usb powered MessagePad

From: Newton (newton_at_spymac.com)
Date: Sat May 07 2005 - 16:26:13 PDT


> Pretty soon we'll have USB hard drives plugged into the Newt,=20
> and CDBurners, and DVD-ROM drives for watching DVDs in Green=20
> and black...
We will probably never see USB storages attached to Newtons. The file
systems and standards of USB drives and the Newton are completely =
different.
External USB hardware is intended to follow international standards and =
the
Newton uses its very own filesystem of soups which is totally different =
and
optimized for power saving. What Adriano did is using only one pin of =
the
USB connection, the power supply pin (and ground pin of course).=20

The biggest step for USB storage implementation in NOS would be to =
transform
the serial data stream of USB into a sort of virtual soup and vice =
versa.
All changes of this soup will have to be transferred back to the USB =
medium.
This will only be possible with major work and probably with additional
hardware which is in itself just another computer. Imagine only the =
impact
of a 700MB CD in comparison to the 64MB of two Flash cards. Even on a
machine with 4MB main RAM the heap is getting used up with big cards and
e.g. many packages installed. On the CD would be 10 times more which has =
to
be checked and installed in the heap, at least the pointers to the CD
content. I don't believe that we'll ever watch a DVD movie in black and
green since everybody bought meanwhile a 49 bucks box for under his TV =
at
home.=20

Marco

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