Universal Serial Bus Specification Revision 1.1 1.1 Motivation The motivation for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) comes from three interrelated considerations: Connection of the PC to the telephone It is well understood that the merge of computing and communication will be the basis for the next generation of productivity applications. The movement of machine-oriented and human-oriented data types from one location or environment to another depends on ubiquitous and cheap connectivity. Unfortunately, the computing and communication industries have evolved independently. The USB provides a ubiquitous link that can be used across a wide range of PC-to-telephone interconnects. Ease-of-use The lack of flexibility in reconfiguring the PC has been acknowledged as the Achilles’ heel to its further deployment. The combination of user-friendly graphical interfaces and the hardware and software mechanisms associated with new-generation bus architectures have made computers less confrontational and easier to reconfigure. However, from the end user’s point of view, the PC’s I/O interfaces, such as serial/parallel ports, keyboard/mouse/joystick interfaces, etc., do not have the attributes of plug-and-play.