BRIEF HISTORY

1969: RS-232-C, the first modern standard for serial ports, is adopted by the Electronic Industries Association.

1970: Centronics develops a send-only parallel port for its first dot matrix printer, which becomes the industry standard for the devices.

1982: MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is released.

1987: IBM includes a bidirectional parallel port on the PS/2, opening the market for sophisticated peripherals like scanners.

1994: A new high-speed parallel port allows data transfer as fast as 2.5 megabytes per second.

1996: USB debuts with transfer speeds of up to 1.5 MB/s.

1998: The iMac is the first computer with only USB (and FireWire) ports.

1999: Windows 98 Second Edition gives adequate support to USB and paves the way for its universal adaptation.

2000: USB 2.0 offers transfer speeds of up to 60 MB/s, surging past parallel ports.

2008: USB 3.0 breaks the gigabyte-per-second mark.

AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

ORIGIN STORY
A tale of printer frustration and power struggles

As an employee at Intel in the mid-90s, Ajay Bhatt would often field calls from his frustrated wife, who couldn’t get the family computer and printer to network properly. “Anytime [my family] wanted to do something simple like print a letter for my daughter’s school, I would get a phone call from my wife that she just can’t print it,” Bhatt toldPC World.

The problem, Bhatt said, was that technology at the time was far too complicated. “Serial ports, parallel ports, the mouse and keyboard ports, they all required a fair amount of software support, and any time you installed a device, it required multiple reboots and sometimes even opening the box,” Bhatt said. “Our goal was that when you get a device, you plug it in, and it works.”

Apple beat USB to the market with its FireWire interface, which was also more than 30 times faster than USB 1.0. But it was more expensive for manufacturers; FireWire peripherals had to have their own controller chips, whereas USB made the computer do all the work. And as Richard C. Moss details at Ars Technica, at that time Apple didn’t have the market dominance to force standards it does today, and it was also struggling financially.

That led Steve Jobs to implement royalties of $1 per port, per unit to use FireWire. USB was an open, royalty-free standard, part of Bhatt’s desire to have a standard as simple and easy as a wall outlet—and it worked.

REUTERS/Steve Marcus
POP QUIZ
What does USB stand for?
Uniform system brainUseful service benefitUniversal serial busUnited standard box
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FUN FACT!
The USB was originally called “Serial Box.”

MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
Why does the USB cable only go in one way?

There’s a 50/50 chance of inserting a USB cable the right way on the first try. So why does it seem like we always get it wrong? “This is probably the single biggest pain point,” Bhatt has acknowledged. “In hindsight, we blew it.” The USB team wasn’t blind to this issue; they considered making a fully reversible connector. But it would have meant using twice as many wires, which would have doubled the cost to the consumer. The team believed consumers wouldn’t be willing to pony up at that price point, and reversibility only arrived with the USB-C standard.

EXPLAIN IT LIKE I’M 5!
The data on the Universal Serial Bus goes back and forth, back and forth

Serial ports are so named because they send bits of data one by one (in serial); parallel ports send multiple bits of data simultaneously (in parallel). Serial ports were slower than parallel ports, so they were used for less data-hungry peripherals like mice and dial-up modems, while parallel ports were used for data-intensive devices like printers and CD burners. If you’re old enough to remember chunky printer connectors with their metal clips and thick wires, you know.

But the complexity of parallel ports caused problems. Signal skew occurred when some parallel data arrived before others, and crosstalk meant that signals bled from one of the closely-bound wires to another. Both slowed down the connection and required processing power to sort out. Once the USB standard was competitive in speed with parallel ports, users were freed of their clips.

HAVE A FRIEND WHO WOULD ENJOY OUR OBSESSION WITH USBS?
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WATCH THIS!
Life before USBs

What did we do before USBs entered our lives? It’s complicated, but Nostalgia Nerd explains.

Flickr user Tony Webster

BY THE DIGITS

8 MB: Storage capacity of the first flash drives

6 billion: USB-supported devices in the world

7: Companies behind the initial development of USB

$3,500: Cost to use the USB logo for companies that aren’t members of the USB Implementers Forum

40 GB/s: Transfer speed of the forthcoming USB 4.0 standard, more than 3,000 times faster than the first version

1: Bill Nye used to prove the power of USBs. In 1998, the Intel team hired Nye for a Las Vegas trade show to plug the last of 127 USB devices into one PC, demonstrating its capabilities.

20,000: Documents Edward Snowden smuggled out of the NSA using a few USB drives

DISRUPTION
A port in a storm

Got an old flash drive? (Probably.) Flash Drives for Freedom, a collaboration with the Human Rights Foundation, uses thousands of USB drives to reach North Koreans, smuggling news, movies, interviews with North Korean defectors, religious texts, TV shows, and more. It’s estimated that more than 1.3 million North Koreans have been reached by these flash drives so far, but data trafficking is a risky proposition. People caught bringing them in have been tortured with beatings and sleep deprivation. Still, supporters believe the content has been able to break through and help North Koreans question Kim Jong Un’s propaganda.

THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!
Serial killer

Although USBs have been hailed as the hero device that has changed the way we work (and live), they’re not all so sweet. Meet the USB Killer, an innocuous-looking USB device that destroys electronics within seconds of being inserted. It works by sucking power from the device (computers, TVs, gaming systems — anything with a USB port) then returning it all in one blast.

This bad boy has been marketed as a way for admins to protect their systems. Of course, it hasn’t taken long to be used with nefarious intent. In 2019, a college student used one to kill $58,000 worth of equipment at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. He faces up to 10 years in jail.

TAKE ME DOWN THIS ? HOLE!

Many USB devices are essential to our work and home computer use. Printers, speakers, mice, keyboards. Others… aren’t. These 10 gadgets curated by PC World are a look at the more frivolous side of USBs.

Reuters/Vivek Prakash
POLL
Do you remember life before USBs?
Yes, and it was ugly.No, and I don’t want to.It doesn’t matter, cords are still a mess today.