Is This in Development yet? It should...

[Jon Westfall]

Internal USB.

Think about it... no more cable messes inside a case... USB (or a slightly faster implementation, even firewire) implemented inside and outside a case. Truly a universal bus, without the pain of setup that SCSI has.

If it isn't in development, it should be. Anyone know.

[ironguy]

If you have USB you are going to have cables. As far as inside and outside, I have a USB 2 card that has USB conections both outside and inside the case. Add to that a 4 port USB hub and I have more USB ports than I need.

I'd like to see optical technology carried a bit further. I have optical connectors on my A/V Receiver, why don't they use them in computing? I would imagine optical speeds are huge.

As far as PC cases are concerned, I intend to set up a different type of PC in my home someday. A single central computing platform and peripherals only at workstations throughout the house. Hang a flat panel over a desk, get a small keyboard, small mouse, and perhaps a local device for CDs, mem cards or whatever. I suppose I could do that with laptops now, but that would be pretty costly!

[Janak Parekh]

Internal USB.
Well... PCI and its parallelism is still much faster than USB. ;) For example, existing 33MHz, 32-bit PCI has a maximum of 132MBps, or approximately 1 gigabit per second bandwidth. And that's only increasing in the next generations of PCI. It certainly has downsides, including distance limitations, but that's about it.

That said, most modern mainboards do support internal USB peripherals -- they've often got an extra header plug to hook up to a pair of external connectors or internal peripherals. A few flash companies offer such USB internal readers with cables.

--janak