Subject: P1394> USB Printing

From: Harry Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 11:36:13 -0400

Classification:
Prologue:
Epilogue: Harry Lewis - IBM Printing Systems

Can someone in the P1394 group explain why there is no similar USB group in the
PWG? Will the results of P1394 apply in any way to USB? Coexist? Conflict?

Any comments, at all?

Harry Lewis - IBM Printing Systems

---

From: Danny Mitchell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 11:54:34 -0500 (CDT)

Harry,

I cannot speak to why there is no USB printing group in the PWG.  Since it
is an ad-hoc organization that is made up of interested parties,  I would
have to assume there are not enough interested parties. 

However with respect to your coexist, conflict question.  Some of the work
done might be applicable to USB as a straight interface specification.  The
mechanics of sending/receiving status and the data transport would be very
different since 1394 is a peer-to-peer bus and USB is a master slave
relationship.  

With the peer-to-peer bus the printer can "pull" system data from the CPU
and therefore the CPU would not need to poll the device as it currently does
now for the parallel port.  I would expect USB to have a similar
architecture as the current designs.  

I do not see any conflict here.  If the USB groups have started work on a
printer specification I am sure that the PWG would welcome the input.
However since the two busses really are intended for very different
applications there might not be much commonality here.

If a common data format for imaging devices was created then that work would
be applicable.  However I don't think the data transport will resemble
anything that is on USB.

Regards,  Danny Mitchell   Serial Bus Solutions SW Manager ( USB,1394,Fibre
Channel )
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