Design Nine outgrew our old office space, and over the past week we moved into new, larger quarters--we're still in Blacksburg, Virginia, though.
I had to completely disassemble my desktop computer, something I have not had to do in over two years, when this machine was brand new. I ended up with a box of some 30+ cables for a computer and office phone, which on the face of it seems absurd for an otherwise entirely straightforward desktop machine used primarily for email and writing. In part, much of the problem has been the extraordinary success of the USB protocol as a peripheral connectivity solution.
In the "old" days, about three years ago, you typically had a couple of serial ports and two or three SCSI devices. You had a limited number of peripherals you could have hooked up at one time, and your ambitions for connected gagdets was low.
With the advent of USB, you could stick a hub on and fill it with as many things as you liked, and they would all actually work very well (most of the time). I have a seven port USB hub, and six ports are in use. Combine those USB cables with phone cables, Firewire cables, and power cables for all the devices, and you end up with a mess. It is incredibly ugly, difficult if not impossible to keep neat, and amazing that it works at all.
Firewire, in theory, should solve many of these problems. Firewire devices can be daisy-chained, so you don't have the multiple cable problem of USB, and Firewire is capable of providing more power than USB, so you can actually eliminate the AC/DC voltage converters entirely. Apple's iPod is a perfect example of this. You connect the iPod to your laptop or desktop with a single, thin Firewire cable that recharges the battery and transfers data several times faster than USB.
But Firewire has yet to reach its potential. Many PCs still do not come with Firewire (it's standard on all Macs), and even on the Mac, it does not always work as expected. My Firewire video camera (no power cable, thank you) does not get along with my Firewire hard drive (big AC power cable), and I have to unplug the camera when I back up files to the external Firewire hard drive.
But I did finally decide I can put my "old" 250 meg Zip drive in a drawer for emergency use. It had been sitting on my desk gathering dust, and the move made me realize I have not used it in well over a year. File exchange with others is now done via attachments and email....like the cable snarls, another special kind of hell the IT industry has refused to address.