Thanks, S. Bettesworth, for your reply. Now I've a 2nd question I haven't been able to get an answer to yet: does anyone know what the maximum speed is for USB 2.0? For USB, it's about 12 million bps.
Although it's much slower than Firewire, it seems control hardware manufacturers are gravitating to providing USB ports on their hardware, not Firewire, probably because USB is getting such widespread adaptation in the computer world, and it beats RS-232. Probably the need for updated data for control and monitoring applications is such that the market for very fast data transfer is not useful in most cases, and its usefulness would be limited (please correct me, readers, if you don't agree.)
Mike