Tech Olive

One port that rules them all! USB is the most widely used port in existence, so it only makes sense to honor the great history of the early days of USB in this month’s Retro Review.

The USB was created to essentially be a user-friendly interface to connect devices to your PC. Before the USB, there was obviously the legacy ports (parallel, serial, PS/2, etc.), which are sadly still being used today by the few and the proud. Back then, you only had one of each port, sometimes two. So if you had multiple devices with the same port, you’d have to get an expansion card with more serial or parallel ports on it. Also, parallel devices required custom drivers and serial devices had to be configured properly (baud rate, parity, etc.)

In short, this was all just a pain in the rear end, but along came the USB.

The Universal Serial Bus interface was invented by Ajay Bhatt of Intel and development began in 1994. USB 1.1 was, in fact, not the first revision. USB 1.0 was introduced in 1996 with a transfer rate of 12 Mbps, as well as a lower transfer rate of 1.5 Mbps for lower bandwidth peripherals. USB 1.1 wasn’t brought into the world until 1998. It had the same transfer rate of 12 Mbps/1.5 Mbps as USB 1.0 and even though it wasn’t the first ever USB revision, it was the first revision to be widely adopted.

How did it become widely adopted? Well, a part of it had to do with issues that were fixed from 1.0, but one of the biggest reasons was…wait for it…the Apple iMac.

When USB started showing up on Windows machines, many people didn’t really make the move over to the new interface right away, simply because they still had their legacy ports. The iMac was the first computer to include USB ports, but no legacy ports. This pretty much forced users to start using USB devices.

USB 2.0 was introduced in 2000, with a transfer rate of 480 Mbps, forty times faster than USB 1.1. USB 3.0 was unveiled in 2008, with a theoretical rate of 4 Gbps. What will the future of USB bring us? How much longer until USB 3.0 becomes the standard? When will USB 4.0 be out? Will USB even last? A lot of questions can be asked, but one thing’s for sure: USB 1.1 is what started a revolution.