Hardware designer and manufacturer, SparkFun, has a short biography about computer engineer Ajay Bhatt who is widely recognized as one of the key inventors of the Universal Serial Bus (USB).
Once the design was finalized, Bhatt and his team worked with other technology companies to promote and standardize the USB. They formed a working group called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) to develop the USB specification, which was first introduced in 1996.
The USB specification quickly gained widespread adoption in the technology industry due to its convenience and versatility, and new versions of the standard were introduced over the years to improve data transfer speeds, power management, and other features. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, and it continues to evolve and improve with each new iteration.
When Intel initially developed the USB, it held the patents for the technology, which allowed the company to control the standard and charge licensing fees for its use. However, Intel soon realized that its proprietary approach was not in the best interests of the industry or consumers. The company recognized that the success of the USB depended on its widespread adoption and interoperability with different devices, which would not be possible if licensing fees were required for every use.
In response, Intel took a bold step and transferred ownership of the USB specifications to a non-profit organization called the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF). The USB-IF is a group of companies that work together to promote and develop the USB standard, with the goal of ensuring that the standard remains open and accessible to all.
Intel's decision to transfer ownership of the USB specifications to the USB-IF was a pivotal moment in the development of the USB standard. It helped to ensure that the USB became a truly universal and open interface, which has had a profound impact on the computer industry and consumers around the world. Today, the USB is used in a wide range of devices, from computers and smartphones to home appliances and automotive systems, and it continues to evolve and improve to meet the needs of an ever-changing technological landscape.
Previously:
(2022) Henn Tan and the Invention of the USB Thumb Drive in Singapore
(2022) Linux Fu: Eavesdropping On Serial
« Possible Meteorite Crashes Through Roof of New Jersey Home | China's Spaceplane Conducted Multiple Maneuvers With a Mystery Object in Orbit »
Related Stories
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
In the old days, if you wanted to snoop on a piece of serial gear, you probably had a serial monitor or, perhaps, an attachment for your scope or logic analyzer. Today, you can get cheap logic analyzers that can do the job, but what if you want a software-only solution? Recently, I needed to do a little debugging on a USB serial port and, of course, there isn’t really anywhere to easily tie in a monitor or a logic analyzer. So I started looking for an alternate solution.
If you recall, in a previous Linux Fu we talked about pseudoterminals which look like serial ports but actually talk to a piece of software. That might make you think: why not put a piece of monitor software between the serial port and a pty? Why not, indeed? That’s such a good idea that it has already been done. When it works, it works well. The only issue is, of course, that it doesn’t always work.
The software in question is interceptty. You may have to build it from source, but there aren’t any oddball dependencies. [...]
[...] The software uses the concept of a backend device and a frontend device. The back device is, usually, your normal serial port. The frontend device is something that interceptty creates. So the idea is that you connect the program to the backend, it creates the front end, and then you connect some other program to the front end. The program will log all the traffic between the program connected to the front end and the port on the back end.
IEEE Spectrum has an article about the USB thumb drive and its inventor, Trek's CEO, Henn Tann in Singapore. The market for USB thumb drives has passed $7 billion as of last year and is expected to surpass $10 billion by 2028.
But Trek 2000 hardly became a household name. And the inventor of the thumb drive and Trek's CEO, Henn Tan, did not become as famous as other hardware pioneers like Robert Noyce, Douglas Engelbart, or Steve Jobs. Even in his home of Singapore, few people know of Tan or Trek.
Why aren't they more famous? After all, mainstream companies including IBM, TEAC, Toshiba, and, ultimately, Verbatim licensed Trek's technology for their own memory stick devices. And a host of other companies just copied Tan without permission or acknowledgment.
USB thumb drives do certainly seem to be everywhere still and have even been a reasonably reliable way to jump into or out of air gapped networks. Examples of that include Stuxnet and the Snowden files, the former destroying hidden equipment in an illegal nuclear weapons programme and the latter exposing a pervasive, illegal surveillance programme. At many small and medium sized businesses, USB thumb drive-based sneakernet stayed alive and well for many a year out of necessity since Netware was wiped out without ever getting viable alternative for in house hosting.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13, @04:55PM (8 children)
I think the article is giving Intel too much credit when it suggests that they did this in the "best interests of the industry or consumers". I'm sure they did it because in their estimation it was in their best interest (i.e. selling more chips, preventing another company from establishing their proprietary standard, etc.).
I'm not criticizing Intel here. Companies (just like individuals) should always do what's in their best interest.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday May 13, @05:24PM (4 children)
USB was in their best interest, and at the same time in the best interest of the end-users. It is just another success story for the strength and utility of open standards. USB would have died on the vine had it stayed proprietary. Everyone sees that, if they think about it, but it has become too common and familiar for people to see it for what it is any more.
The world has gotten jaded and begun in recent decades to forget the importance of open standards. The WWW and the Internet have been poster children for the benefits of open standards. However, what with all the proprietary networks belonging to at least a generation past and the role of open standards has begun to be forgotten. Networking standards are the most obvious in some ways but there are many more that we have been taking for granted, such as USB, and thus the points made in the fine article. Because the open standards have been taken for granted, proprietary specifications and patent-encumbered standards have been allowed to spread again. Been there, done that. We don't need a new proliferation of closed formats or closed specification.
Despite the ignorant push towards proprietary of late, open standards are still quite common and, because of that push, needed all the more: Cloud-based software is the next big threat to independence and sovereignty. Through software as a service, hostile companies are able to capture not just the format wrapping your data but your data itself. The way out is not just self-hosting but self-hosting with open formats. Otherwise the end game will be down the path of paying ever-increasing subscription fees to stave off the threat of having your own files deleted -- a month at a time.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday May 13, @09:25PM (3 children)
Your post is insightful, but then you end with cloud software. The cloud domain is absolutely teeming with open standards. Almost all, if not all, cloud technologies have both open API standards and FOSS implementations. Kubernetes, Docker, OCI, Knative, Cilium, etc. Even provider-specific configuration APIs are standardized through FOSS tools like Terraform.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday May 14, @05:16AM (2 children)
I stand by what I wrote in the lines about "Cloud" and would point out what's actually on the market as far as both Software As A Service (SAAS) and Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) go: Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Apple iDrive, and more. The options deployed against us are all pernicious in a way that looks traditional closed source, proprietary systems and software look almost benign in comparison.
Remember that SAAS and IAAS are not just about control and lock down of the software but of your own data, too. At least a proprietary format for files in your own physical possession might theoretically be reverse engineered and eventually made accessible without the proprietary programs (e.g. M$ Office many formats). However, if your data resides on a remote server, the owners of that server can do what they want with that data and make you dance to access it. CFAA and other heinous regulations would send your ass to jail indefinitely if you tried in anyway to go around the gatekeepers to access your own data held there.
The Stockholm Syndrome will eventually kick in and everyone will eventually lower their expectations and become fine with subscriptions to access their own data. But in the mean time while there is a window of opportunity, go and ask the chumps what they think of Adobe's SAAS subscription compared to the old stand-alone suite, or ask different chumps about what they think about having to use M$ SAAS offerings as compared to having to use the old stand-alone suites.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14, @11:37AM (1 child)
> ... or ask different chumps about what they think about having to use M$ SAAS offerings as compared to having to use the old stand-alone suites.
I wouldn't know, still using MS-Office 97 -- with a little messing around it still works fine under Win 7. Bonus, it's blazing fast on newer hardware. Since I used that version of Word to write/edit a couple of books (with equations, figures, tables) I'm pretty familiar with the bugs and work-arounds. Why would I want to update and then have to learn a bunch of new work-arounds, new UI, etc?
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday May 14, @11:49AM
Why would I want to update and then have to learn a bunch of new work-arounds, new UI, etc?
You might not want to buy the new version but you would be forced to on the occasion you need to work with the new document formats, assuming you have not already been running LibreOffice parallel to MSO. M$ has used and still uses arbitrary changes to its undocumented, proprietary formats to drive new sales such that if you need to interoperate with the new formats, you'll need LibreOffice at least. But M$ is really betting against that and expecting that you'll just shell out for a newer version just to get at those files. Further, they are betting that you won't think about what you are getting into when you get the "cloud" version and start keeping your files not only logically locked in their formats but physically locked in their (underutilized) server farms.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rich on Sunday May 14, @08:11PM (2 children)
The article is bullshit. Intel did this to get a grip on the market of desktop connectivity. It was not hard to see the awkwardness of PS/2 mouse/keyboard connectors (vs ADB (*)) and what was going on with the bulky parallel cables (EPP/ECP) for printers. and on Apple's side the ubiquitous SCSI, which in the common "Centronics 50" form peaked out at about 1 MByte/sec. So the brief was a.) to come up with a cheap and simple connector to cover all this and b.) make it sufficiently complicated to pile up a number of patents. Conveniently, the data rate (12 MBit/s) is about what you get over your average wire with TTL signals. They took a few ideas from 10BaseT (notably the idea of point-to-point rather than daisy-chain or bus) and voila, USB 1.0.
They put that in their 430HX chipset - and no one cared. I had an XP55T2P4 (legendary Asus Socket 7 mainboard) back then, which had USB on board. USB was a non-issue for the PC people. Only when the iMac became popular with USB, it caught on. (Then I remembered the board already had that and got myself a slot bracket with USB connectors.) USB would have still been fine if it stayed in its 1.1 incarnation, but no, they had to 1-up FireWire and come out with USB 2 and 480 MBit instead of using a separate, more future proof connector, it's been a kludge job ever since. (But hey, even today after many more layers of kludges, plug in a storage device into USB C and it seems to always work. Something that can't be said about Bluetooth.)
(*) Footnote: ADB was designed by Woz, as I see it, as a "rehab" project after his plane crash. In its ingenuity, it's a mere shadow of the designs he did before. Stopping short of hot-pluggability, which it really should have been able to do in its design use cases, and with a seriously "meh" enumeration scheme.
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Monday May 15, @07:03PM (1 child)
"ADB was designed by Woz, as I see it, as a "rehab" project after his plane crash. "
bullshit
why is his name not mentioned anywhere in the "Front Desk Bus" specs?
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/adb/fdb/ [bitsavers.org]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday May 15, @09:59PM
You're very likely right.
There's lots of lore around the web that connects Woz with ADB (and has been for a very long time), but he's neither listed in the specs nor in the patents. I checked the iWoz book too, and no mention of ADB between the crash and Cloud9. The lore also implies that this came first with the IIgs (and was thus developed for it), but the August 1984 memos by Peter Ashkin seem to be directed at the Macintosh side of thing (Burrell Smith).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Saturday May 13, @08:18PM
In 2000 I looked into both USB and Firewire for a new design. Firewire was better. It was not only faster, but supported isochronous transfers. As our device had a video camera in it we really wanted isochronous.
Turns out Apple had exorbitant fees for Firewire, so USB it was. Then the customer went toes up so the product never got past the paper stage.
I did have fun playing with pretty much USB/Firewire camera I could get my hands on though. Video tech has come a long way since then.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DadaDoofy on Sunday May 14, @11:42AM (3 children)
This guy was an idiot. Why would anyone design a connector that has a 50/50 chance of actually working when you plug it in?
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Sunday May 14, @02:58PM (2 children)
That's not much different from a D-connector, the contemporary alternative.
PS/2 connectors were even better: without a suitably moulded plug, the notches of the mini-DIN connector are all too easy to miss, and then you're bending pins as you mash in a round connector with apparently infinite rotational symmetry.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 14, @03:12PM
2) For some connectors even if they don't work when rotated by 180 at least it's usually obvious which way you should be trying - e.g. the UK plug.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @01:45AM