> Also, AFAIK no proper USB printers have yet been designed, the only ones I've heard of are "software" printers, like "software" modems.
That's wrong. All USB printers I know behave exactly like a parallel port printer -- only that the data, that is formerly sent via the parallel port, is now sent via the USB serial cable. Moreover, USB is a LOT faster that the internal CIA parallel port and even a bit faster than the dedicated parallel port cards. And I would argue that it even takes less CPU power (very certain for the internal parallel port, as it has to handshake every single byte and probably also less than the replacement cards). You see, I formerly connected my old Epson Stylus 850 through a USB to centronics adapter and it just worked all the same as before -- same drivers, just usbparallel.device instead of parallel/hyperPAR.device. But now I've got a very nice Canon i950 without a parallel port and it works perfectly!
[Edit: Ah, and speaking of the PPC boards (to not be completely off topic), USB1.1 is still twice as fast as the fastest parallel port, and uses less CPU power (DMA driven), wherewas I think the legacy ISA parallel port is polled.]
> USB is an evolving standard still, and IIRC not 100% backwards compatible.
The problem are more the vendors of some cheap devices in the mass storage sector, but on printers you're very safe that you won't run into problems. Mice and keyboards should be generally safe aswell.
