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New USB logos will simplify branding on hubs and cables (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 years ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 58 points 2 years ago (10 children)

It's disturbing that I kinda miss the pre-USB days when, if the cable matched the port physically, it also matched the port in terms of capabilities (unless someone was doing something deliberately stupid). At least that meant you knew right away whether you had the right cable or not.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago* (4 children)

    USB-C has been a blessing and curse. One port that does everything, except when it doesn't. Even charging is now complicated by the "guess the cable that supports the right PD type" game.

    Not that the old days were much better. I don't miss faffing around with the myriad of serial and parallel port modes and settings.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    Problem with the old days was that you had to have each kind of cable for it to work. No LPT cable? No printer. Hope the cable is long enough. There was no integrated Bluetooth or wifi, or even a dongle available. Haven’t even gotten around to the internals yet with ribbon cables for floppy or IDE or whatever.

    Yeah, USB-C comes with it’s own issues, but I much prefer this to the bin full of cables, plugs, wall warts, connectors and adapters that were kept on hand just in case.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    At least with barrel jacks that would have been an easy way to frie your electronics back then. With USB C you might encounter incompatibility, but at least you won't break anything (with a few exceptions like the Nintendo Switch getting bricked by connecting certain 3rd party chargers to the official dock, or using a bad 3rd party dock)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Wasnt the parallel port also used for serial for awhile? Not quite perfect but better than now I suppose.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Although serial and parallel shared the same overall pin count and connector style, they used opposite genders and the two were incompatible.

    Generally, If the port on the PC was male it was serial if the port was female it was parallel. But realistically you'd never see a 25-pin serial on a computer unless you were looking at something very ancient and strange. Even back into the '80s, The PCs used DB9 connectors for serial and adapters or the cable itself would have to convert it over the standard 25 pin connector on the modems.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    they used opposite genders

    Not necessarily. For IBM PCs that was true, but my UltraSPARC had a differently-gendered serial port which was very annoying because neither standard straight nor null-modem cables worked. It was a DB-25, carrying two ports.

    Those connectors were used for a lot of different things, with no autonegotiation no nothing. At least the pinout for port A was compatible with the standard DB-25 one-port pinout, just with different gender.

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