Bob,

Minor corrections here: Most new MIDI equipment items also come with "To Host" serial MIDI ports that can connect directly to serial ports of laptop/desktop PCs without the use of extra MIDI interface. There are also older parallel-to-MIDI interfaces that the laptop can use besides USB and PCMCIA MIDI interfaces. USB devices are more flexible and less problematic in setup than traditional serial/parallel devices since there is no need to set individual system interrupt numbers on the devices - no interrupt conflicts. We can daisy-chain up to 127 devices (theoretically) in a USB bus; USB version 2 can achieve 480 Mbps, even higher than Firewire/IEEE 1394's 400 Mbps.

Paul Ip
from Texas