this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
578 points (97.8% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
3344 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 208 points 1 year ago (3 children)

TL;DR: its cheaper that way,

And i value that decision

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I can bet you it's incompetence. They failed upwards. Sure, protocol is great and universal, but connector is atrocious and it has nothing to do with cost. Few points in favor of this hypothesis:

  1. Plastic inside of the connector was initially black. Why chose hard to see color? Go with something easier to see;
  2. Connector is perfectly rectangular and only distinguishing feature they made hard to see. Don't make ti symmetrical if it's not reversible, basic design principle;
  3. Connector is perfectly rectangular making it difficult to insert. There's a reason why most connectors have rounded corners, they are self-correcting, even TypeC does this;
  4. They made various different connector types but pushed for the only one with these issues. No one ever had doubts how type B or mini B or micro B go in.
[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Initially, the plastic inside the connector was white. They started to use black to denote USB2.0 devices, and USB2.0 rapidly became the standard. They at least tried to do something similar with blue plastic with USB3.0.

It's basically the only example I can think of where the plug and socket are rotationally symmetrical without also being reversible. That's the kind of thing where I ask "did you test this before you shipped it?" Thirty years later we're still plagued by the damn thing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right you are. Completely forgot about that. That said, I don't think USB1 was a standard for too long. If I remember correctly it went to 2.0 pretty fast.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you had Macs, USB 1 was around a lot earlier, and really only good for peripherals and HID for a long time. FireWire and external SCSI drives were necessary because USB 1 wasn’t even viable for anything beyond external floppy drives. USB2 was a boon to external drives and bigger thumb drives, but took a while to arrive at the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think I had anything with USB1 in it. Even the early Pentium machines had USB2.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I built a Pentium 2 in 1998 and needed a separate pci card to add usb 1.1 (which was what most early Usb was) USB2 came out in 2000. By then I was ready to upgrade the motherboard and the next one had USB built in, but I can’t remember if it was usb 2 or not, since that might have been late 99

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I can't remember either, it's been a while. :)

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Also a male USB 2 plug fits perfectly into a RJ45 slot :-/ In my days of tech support, I've seen multiple people plugging their USB printer cable into the network slot of their computer and it's a perfect fit so they were always convinced they didn't do anything wrong... That's clearly a design flaw while all other connectors have distinct sizes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never heard of people plugging USB into LAN, but now that you mention it they are the same size. Luckily all the contacts are shielded.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I've done it myself when feeling the back of a pc and trying to get away without looking. I've been doing IT support since high school.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Way back before USB, joysticks had a DIN-25 connector that was identical to the ~~MIDI~~ network connector.

I blindly plugged my brand new MS Force Feedback joystick into the ~~MIDI~~ network port behind my miditower (yes I'm that old) and watched the magic smoke rise out of the joystick. That was not a good day to learn about plugs. The network carries 50 volts or something. Stick wasn't happy.

edit: corrections! Here's a photo of the network card: https://i.imgur.com/fBJixkM.png

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Strange. I always thought they were the exact same port. Because most of the time you would need a sound card to plug in a joystick. And nowadays I can't use my MS Force Feedback because all the USB adaptors don't implement all of the MIDI stuff the joystick needs to run the force feedback.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Oh you are right, I misremembered: what actually happened was that I was indeed going for the MIDI port of my SoundBlaster card but found a matching socket in my networrk card!

I will update my comment to correct this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My girlfriend works in IT at a school so I asked if she's encountered this too. She said "all the time, they're right next to each other" she also added that a lot of people put their thin charging cables into the headphone jack breaking their laptops. And that for some of them they "fit better" in that jack than the one it's meant to go in.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You mean USB Type-B, right?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No one ever had doubts how type B or mini B or micro B go in.

I agree with most of your post, but micro B is a step too far. That fucking plug was always inserted with the following procedure:

  1. Try to plug it in.
  2. Flip the side and try to plug it in again.
  3. Flip it again because you had the right damn side the first time.

Always, always, always.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Well, if nothing else it's easier to than type A.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hindsight is 20/20. You're raising every issue with the original USB plug, then proceed to highlight how they addressed these issues going forward.

You're describing inexperience and calling it incompetence.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

AFAIK the real predecessor to USB was Serial cables and those were an absolute shit show. USB set out to create a more usable interface with a lower profile and cheaper cost. In many ways the minor flaws in USB becoming common gripes is USB becoming a victim of its own success. I don't think they originally set out to become a power charging standard so the frequency at which devices were plugged in increased over time .

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

At least serial cables weren't symmetric, although just barely. AT and PS/2 cables (or any DIN) were much more of a pain for me to plug in blind.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't even know that I would call it inexperience. I just think a major part of the first pass was selling the idea of USB. You can design a perfect cable, plug, and protocol, it doesn't mean anyone will use it. Most investors don't know much about the technical details of a product. They do, however, understand the price. If you're trying to make a difference in the world, you don't always get to do it with style and quality.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No one ever had doubts how type B or mini B or micro B go in.

How lucky you were to never have a device that had one of these upside-down.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Or a printer with the B connector rotated 90° to one side.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)

New question: why did it have rotational symmetry?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

New question: Fuck me? 🥺

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Cheaper. Any other questions?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Considering the much higher cost of production then vs now, it makes complete sense. The economy of scale took care of that problem with time.