Japanese peripheral manufacturers are only giving lukewarm support to the much-vaunted Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection interface — despite Microsoft Corp making USB support an integral part of Windows 98 (CI No 3,440), Apple Computer Corp pushing the benefits of USB for the iMac (CI 3,448) and Acer Group facilitating USB support for its new Computer X project (CI 3,438). The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports that major players such as Canon Inc and Seiko Epson Corp have produced just a few printers conforming to the nascent interface, but not the flood of business and consumer peripherals – scanners, printers, digital cameras and digital video disk drives – that Microsoft and Apple have been talking about. Japanese manufacturers are fighting shy of the new port because it pushes production costs up – a printer with a USB port will still need the conventional interfaces so it can be connected to PCs running the Windows 95 operating system. Only NEC Corp is bucking this trend and it has already released over 35 peripherals fitted with a USB port. The interface, which was originally launched back in 1996 (CI No 3,050), operates around thirty times faster than standard serial ports, because the bus transfer rate is 12Mbps, rather than the 115kbps of the serial port. The interface is referred to as ‘plug and play’ because devices can be connected and disconnected from a PC while it is on.
