So the sad facts are:

• PC market is driven by office applications. It is expected that the typical PC user is a secretary, who runs M$Word, type 1-2 pages, prints it, repeats this 10x and goes home. It is expected that she wants also to listen to MP3 music and browse quickly through flashing and blinking webpages with size well above a megabyte and information content well below a millibit.
  
• this influences the software makers, including the dominant OS maker. They are constantly polishing the icons and they don't want anything which would disturb the MP3 player from playing MP3s smoothly
  
• this influences the hardware makers. The MP3 player eats up all the processor time; and the browser together with the text editor finishes off the memory and disk space - time for offering an upgrade. Since USB printers are introduced, nobody needs parallel port and serial port was not needed anyway; so these are omitted.
  
• this influences the secretary. She must throw off the old parallel printer and buy a new USB one. She also gets a free USB memory stick and an USB mouse as a bonus. She also buys a fancy pair of USB speakers, flashing fullcolour LEDs...
  
• this influences the software maker. Throws away "legacy" support and starts producing megabytes of "USB device drivers" (including a plugin for the MP3 player to flash LEDs on USB speakers).
  
• this influences the hardware makers. More USB ports are needed. Even more USB ports are needed. No space for anything else on the case, but USB ports.
  
• Secretary complains that the mouse stops moving intermittently when she clicks "flash wildly" on the MP3 player
  
• software maker responds with 100MB driver upgrade
  
• hardware maker comes out with new USB3.0 (BlazingSpeedTM) ports
  
• etc.

Where do you see a SINGLE LINE on our poor boy trying to bit-bang a microcontroller???

JW

PS. Sorry for the OT, having a bad day with... computers and stuff...