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The USB paradox is one of the most familiar experiences of the digital age. Every time you try to plug in a USB cord, it seems like you always get it wrong on the first try. It doesn't matter how much attention you pay to the plug or the cord or the icons on the cord. It's always wrong.
And there's a good reason for that! In an interview published Thursday by DesignNews, Intel's Ajay Bhatt spoke at length about why the ubiquitous technology has been so infuriating for so long. Bhatt was a member of the team that developed USB technology. Even at the start of development, they knew that making the connector flippable would be a better user experience in the long run. But doing so would require twice the wiring and more circuitry, which would increase costs.
"If you have a lot of cost up front for an unproven technology it might not take off. So that was our fear. You have to be really cost conscious when you start out," Bhatt said.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday December 03 2017, @09:39AM (13 children)
What I don't understand about USB is why did it start out so slow.
At the time it was developed we already had megabit nics and gigabit nics were starting to hit the market.
Why did it have to start with 1.0 started out at 1.5 Mbit, and less than two years later 1.1 jumps to 12 Mbits. Nearly 10x as fast.
Two years later 2.0 offers 480 Mbits a 40x improvement.
Now, with different cables and connectors 5, 10, and 20 gigabit.
Once they got the wires figured out vor USB3x, why even bother with 3.0? Just go straight to 3.2 (20 gig).
Its not like there was any actual reason for the delay, The chips were always within technical grasp.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:21AM (8 children)
USB started out replacing RS-232 and parallel interfaces compared to which USB 1.0 was > 10x faster. The speed bumps came as a result of competition with Apple upping the ante with firewire/thunderbolt.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @01:56PM (6 children)
USB is useless compared to RS-232. Ever tried screwing-in your USB connector? You can do that with RS-232 and parallel port. Now things can just fall out when they are needed plugged-in.
Also, RS-232 cannot harm your computer because of how it works. USB is a virus-carrier which should be considered hostile hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @05:04PM (2 children)
Serial port malware now:
I'm going to plug in this USB drive I found. What's this 'composite device' mean? Hey, it is controlling my keyboard. Hey, it just opend its own drive and ran software. WTF IS GOING ON? Better disconnect this before something bad happens.... OH NOES! Where did my files go?
Serial port malware then:
I'm going to plug in this serial drive I found. Hmm, gotta find a free IRQ. Wait, why does this thing want so much memory and two DMA channels? Wait according to this, it needs IRQ 1 and 15? WTF is going on? Better disconnect this before something bad happens.... PHEW, All my files safe and sound.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:00AM (1 child)
You don't think people would start noticing something fishy when their RS-232 hardware comes not with an RS-232 connector, but with an ISA connector?
RS-232 doesn't need - or even know about - IRQs and DMA channels, that's only the serial port card.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @05:11AM
WHOOSH!
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Sunday December 03 2017, @05:45PM (2 children)
USB is also based on a polling based model instead of an interrupt based model. The fallout from that decision is a bit of increased latency which makes some usage of a parallel port attached to a USB bus impossible. The latency can cause issues with the RS232 connection too depending on what is being carried over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:02AM (1 child)
Yup, I tried replaced an ISA serial card with a USB to RS-232 converter, and found out it was useless. The time for the flow control signals to propagate via the USB hardware to the OS is longer than it takes to overflow the buffers in the hardware, and of course the converter contains a bog standard serial chip that doesn't handle flow control internally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:55PM
There's a lot of really shitty USB<->UART adapters on the market.
The good ones are made by FTDI.
But then there's a lot of really shitty counterfeit FTDI parts on the market, so make sure you buy from a legit distributor.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Sunday December 03 2017, @08:34PM
And also use cases. Mice, keyboards, printers, they developed USB to the specifications best suited to its use cases.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @12:55PM
In addition to the points made by another commentator, USB utilizes host processing. Are you sure you'd be processing 20gbps on your Win 95 100MHz Pentium?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @01:49PM
The reason is that USB was always a scam. No one will update their hardware if they can get the maximum speed with the very first hardware. So versions are introduced which are deliberately crippled. Selecting the USB speed in BIOS would have been good, but they chose not to. More money can be made selling the newest chip instead of the best chip only once.
(Score: 4, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Sunday December 03 2017, @11:40PM
it was never meant for high speed, not in the early days. mouse, keyboard, modem, printer. all relatively slow things.
NEVER meant for disk or fast i/o. not in the early days.
I remember just buying motherboards when usb came out. the first chipset (triton?) on tyan and asus and supermicro all had the chips but either no usb headers soldered in, or they were there, but just would not work. first boards were junk, for usb. plus, there was almost nothing in the market to try out; all too soon. ('pipeline burst cache' was a DIMM looking thing and you bought that separately for your motherboard; that's how long ago this was!)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Monday December 04 2017, @12:46AM
The article distorts history. USB only gets compared to Firewire. Which was only specified in 1995 and did not hit a wide audience until 2000 when the "PowerBook G3 (Firewire)", aka "Pismo" was introduced. By 1995 USB 1 was already widespread in hardware, as can be seen on the legendary Asus XP55T2P4 boards. No one bothered to connect the headers to the outside, though, and it was only W95OSR2 that delivered the first support, iirc. I had one of these Asus boards and only bought and connected a slot panel with two USB plugs when I saw them on fire sale.
USB initially had to compete with ADB, an almost-good solution designed by none other than Woz himself. Thats probably where the "Low Speed" specs come from. Coincidentally about the maximum speed that you'll get over a short run single ended cable connection with TTL level drivers. Later on, someone at Intel probably put up a requirement that they had to do stereo CD audio, and for good measure hit 1 MB/s net. Coincidentally about the maximum speed that one will reliably get over a PCB trace at TTL levels. I would assume that the differential signaling, the point-to-point layout, and isochronous endpoints slipped into the feature set by that time.
I also assume that USB was always meant to be dirt cheap. That is, they a.) had to interface with endpoints running on very primitive microcontrollers inside mice and their ilk and b.) absolutely wanted to get away without requiring a PHY chip like Ethernet needed (mind you, this was when AUI/AAUI was on the computer, requiring an external PHY, because no one knew whether Thickwire, Thinwire or Twisted Pair was to be used). If you look at the USB connectors compared to other connectors from back then, you'll find it a bit weird, and that probably is because you could build the A plugs with PCB technology, right angle sheet folding and injection moulding, whereas other connectors needed milled pins, plastic carriers and stamp formed shells.
So, the hardware makes a lot of sense for those times. The protocol and software however has a few strange and complicated idiosyncrasies, which I can only explain by Intel trying to get some patentable weirdness into the standard. It also seems that Intel tried to play foul after getting adopters on board, which led to the development of OHCI vs Intel's own UHCI controller by some adopters.
The high speed variants only came later, as an afterthought, to counter (and probably with the intent to destroy) FireWire, and later with the intent to leverage the installed base instead of doing a clean slate high speed interconnect. Those are all pretty badly kludged on (eg. you need EHCI and either UHCI or OHCI for high speed). In 1995 a lot of people was probably assuming that serious transfer rates to local I/O devices were a firm domain of SCSI and its descendents).
And then, not going for the technical limit is of course natural, if you own a monopoly, because you can cash in twice or three times instead with smaller steps. (The SD card limits, and I suspect photo sensors, too, exhibit that pretty well).