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USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago (26 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:

Plastic inside of the connector was initially black. Why chose hard to see color? Go with something easier to see;
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;
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;
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 (5 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 (4 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. :)

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