USB everywhere

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I started looking for a wide screen for my living room. One model that stuck me for its feature are the Sony Bravia, which sports an Ethernet connection and an USB connector. It can display various media stored on a mass-storage device. Which made me realize that most of the electronic devices I own have USB connectors to act as controllers my two wireless access points (to share printers), my NAS (to mount mass-storage devices), my printer (again to mount mass-storage devices).

My Airport Express APs cannot mount USB-mass storage devices, but later models can. This standard is becoming really ubiquitous. The funny thing is, if you look at it, the various standards that make this work are really old:

  • USB mass storage was defined in 1998.
  • It uses a restricted SCSI command set. SCSI was defined 1986.
  • Usually, the file-system is FAT which appeared in 1980.
  • The filesystem follows the Design rule for Camera File system which was designed in 1998 – this is the part that defines the DCIM directory.
  • The most common data format is probably the JPEG images. JPEG was standardised in 1992.
  • In JPEG files, the meta-data is specified in the EXIF format which originated in the TIFF format. >TIFF was defined in 1986 by the Aldus coporation.

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