this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Depends, back in the home computer days swapping around joysticks and mouse (and less often lightpens and paddles) was a pretty common occurrence. And over in the console world we had multiple gamepads, multitabs, GameBoy Link cables and the like that also saw a ton of plug-in action.
PC was somewhat special, since joysticks, keyboard, mouse and printers all used different ports, often only accessible on the hard to reach backside of the PC case and sometimes even screwed in. Hotplugging was also not officially supported. Those are however all the issues that USB was specifically designed to fix, so more plug-in action was to be expected.
That said, it is quite true that reversibility really wasn't a concern back than at all. None of the other ports had it, and USB was a huge improvement over previous PC port designs.