I’m kind of surprised, since they talk about all the other roots of modern protocols, that they don’t mention that USB was heavily influenced by the Atari 8-bit SIO subsystem [1] according to its designer.
It seems to ne there was quite a bit of cool ahead-of-it’s-time technology in the Atari 8-bit range that went unnoticed because “it was just a games machine”. SIO, with its universal bus interface and universal driver format, tied in with CIO (centralized input.output) that used the same driver/handler system for the keyboard and screen devices…
I always loved the Commodore bus...simple, daisy chainable, standard connector, etc. I remember being quite disappointed by the initial PC hard drive controller cards..
That's really interesting! I never owned an Atari 8-bit but reading about them now they sure seem like they were years ahead of their competitors in some important ways.
It seems to ne there was quite a bit of cool ahead-of-it’s-time technology in the Atari 8-bit range that went unnoticed because “it was just a games machine”. SIO, with its universal bus interface and universal driver format, tied in with CIO (centralized input.output) that used the same driver/handler system for the keyboard and screen devices…
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO