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USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 208 points 3 years ago (33 children)

TL;DR: its cheaper that way,

And i value that decision

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  • [–] 99 points 3 years 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:

    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.
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  • [–] 55 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (3 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 44 points 3 years ago (7 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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 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

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 35 points 3 years ago (5 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.

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  • [+] 8 points 3 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Mini B was rated for something like 10x fewer insertion cycles than micro B, the retaining tabs would give out and the connector would fall off... or worse, twist and break the socket's inner plastic bit.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    For some reason I always had fewer problems (meaning none) with mini B breaking than with micro B or C breaking.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    In my experience, Mini B was mostly used for data transfer, along with some other port to do the charging. Micro B got introduced as the "all in one" data+charging port. I've seen both kinds of ports break, but only the Mini B ones that were also used for charging; the data-only ones, were fine.

    My conclusion is that charging ports use more insertion cycles and are more likely to break, and I keep magnetic charging adapters in all of them (as a side effect, twisting the cable or pulling at an angle just disconnects it, instead of breaking the port).

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (3 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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    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 .

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 42 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    New question: why did it have rotational symmetry?

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