Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 544 posts

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#491

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #402
oblio wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I broke mine on a S21. It's also getting wobbly on 2 Essential Phones. As OP said, now those 3 expensive devices are mostly broken or at risk instead of the cheap cable. It's bad design compared to the Lightning connector, and I don't like Apple...

Be that as it may, the Lightning port's communications are shit and inferior to those of the ancient 30-pin iPod port. Lightning can't even deliver full HD video; the iPod port could. And what Lightning does deliver is compressed trash.

For the aggrieved downvoters: https://blog.panic.com/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#492

Post by nerpderp82 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #287
nerpderp82 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is malicious, you cut off the d-sub connector and put another one on. I have never heard of someone replacing a monitor because the pins on the connector were damaged.

I've never heard of anyone replacing their hard wired monitor cable. And in any case I certainly wouldn't have had the skills, so I think "malicious" is an uncalled-for term here. Maybe my boss (the owner) knew better and chose to charge people for new monitors, but I definitely didn't.

As a repair shop, it is your job to repair the broken thing, not just sell them a new one. A big shielded molded cable can be fixed, either at the connector or replacing the whole cable where it terminates into the PCB. If I had known about a shop disposing of 500-700$ monitors with bad cables, I would have made a fortune.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#493

Post by nerpderp82 »

dboreham wrote: post #401
lmm wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never wired a plug? I'm baffled that it would never occur to you that the connector is replaceable.

Heh, as a former EE masquerading as a software developer, I would elicit gasps by...taking the case off a computer (do it while it's turned on and jaws hit the floor).

I once opened the hood of a running car.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#494

Post by MiddleEndian »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #74
lesuorac wrote: post #13

I know everybody is still on the high from USB-C but I'm still going to go on the record it will be one of the biggest disasters in cable history. 1) There's going to be video-only cables; low-voltage only cables; etc and this time everything is usb-c so you can literally only tell which ables work by testing all of the dozen cables instead of the 1-2 USB-As you have. 2) The connector is symmetrical but the pins aren…

I had to do a double take after reading this comment to make sure I wasn't reading an old thread from 2014 or something. USB-C has been out for years now and neither of these predictions have come to pass. Your comment aged poorly before you even finished writing it. USB-C isn't without its problems, but neither of those are one of them.

USB-C has been fucking fantastic for me. I plug one USB-C cable into my personal laptop or my work laptop, and I get a USB hub for my external keyboard and mouse, my external monitor, and power, all with a single plug. Makes it so easy to swap everything in and out.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#495

Post by [deleted] »

crote wrote: post #448
dheera wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just put + and - through a rectifier and you don't need an extra pin. Data lines -- use differential signalling and polarity determined by whether +/- got reversed by the rectifier or not. Or do like Comcast does and put all bidirectional data through 1 conductor at multi-gigabit speeds.

How are you going to implement the rectifier, though? The usual implementation is using diodes, but that means you lose twice the diode forward voltage to the rectifier. Even with a Schottky diode that means you are losing 0.5V-1.0V. That's a 10%-20% loss at 5V! You could use a transistor-based "ideal diode" solution, but that's not going to be cheap - especially in the 90s.

[deleted]

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#496

Post by wolrah »

rusk wrote: post #413
musicale wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCgamer: > Incidentally, the late Steve Jobs deserves a tip-of-the-hat for helping USB become a long-lasting standard. It was in 1998 that USB made some real headway, courtesy of the iMac G3, the first computer to ship with only USB ports for external devices (there were no serial or parallel ports). That came three years after USB 1.0 debuted, with a data rate of 12Mbps. Also PCgamer: > Given that it was a protocol…

> the first computer to ship with only USB ports I remember presenting this in a project as an undergraduate and I was challenged by the lecturer that it would be highly unusual for a consumer device to ship without RS232 and I could only say “yeah”

> I remember presenting this in a project as an undergraduate and I was challenged by the lecturer that it would be highly unusual for a consumer device to ship without RS232 and I could only say “yeah”

It's kinda funny that this makes complete sense to me and I wouldn't have argued it either, but at the same time despite having been using computers since the late '80s the only thing I've ever had that required the use of a serial port for normal operation was my 2001-era Palm m100.

PS/2 keyboards/mice, parallel printers, and gameport controllers I had many of each, but all my modems were internal so the first time I ever plugged something in to a serial port was a null-modem cable in late '99 so my friend and I could use Windows 98 Direct Cable Connection to play Counter-Strike against each other without having to buy ethernet cards.

Aside from that one Palm device everything I've ever plugged in to an actual serial port has been a temporary thing like that null-modem connection. Mostly serial console for last resort access to misbehaving network appliances. Even then, most devices that have had the slightest bit of effort put in to them in the last 20 years have at least built in a USB-Serial adapter these days so we don't have to deal with the battle of devices that want full 12v RS232 and USB-DE9 adapters that deliver somewhere between 5 and 8.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#497

Post by FullyFunctional »

That's of course nonsense as others have pointed out, but I still decry the insane electrical implementation: bidirectional differential[1] pairs. Having instead (like Firewire) a dedicated pair in each direction is so much simpler and leads to much better performance. Instead we got evermore convoluted and complicated USB which has long surpassed Firewire in cost of cables etc.

[1] of course USB isn't always truly differential which is part of the problem.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#498

Post by elzbardico »

oblio wrote: post #391
cyberax wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incorrect. USB-C design maximizes the device longevity by removing springs from the device that typically get worn down quickly. The cable is responsible for the grip. You do get a protruding tongue on the device side, but it's well protected.

I broke mine on a S21. It's also getting wobbly on 2 Essential Phones. As OP said, now those 3 expensive devices are mostly broken or at risk instead of the cheap cable. It's bad design compared to the Lightning connector, and I don't like Apple...

Most repair shops are able to solder a new connector in the motherboard. You could try it.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#499

Post by elzbardico »

barrkel wrote: post #462
postmodest wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least PS/2 cables were mostly made with "keyed" rubber jackets where one side was flat and the other rounded, so in the dark you could tell which way was up. (Though, that keyboard and mouse were different ports was stupid, so it loses points there)

PS/2 connectors were a regression on AT DIN & D sub 9-pin serial for most practical purposes. The only upside of PS/2 was a higher mouse data rate, particularly with high monitor refresh rates, made mouse movement smoother. You didn't get this for free in Windows though, you needed a registry tweak to tell the mouse driver to bump the sample rate. The huge downside was that PS/2 peripherals couldn't be inserted when…

The fact that keyboard and mouse connectors in ps/2 were not interchangeable was really annoying. No matter how much USB-A is annoying, this alone made having USB keyboards and mice a win in my book.

Re: USB inventor explains why the connector was not designed to be reversible (2019)

#500

Post by pastalex »

via Joel Johnson's oral history (https://www.fastcompany.com/3060705/an-oral-history-of-the-u... )

'Okay, but: why wasn’t the plug reversible?

Ajay Bhatt: Good question. We had looked at it, but the whole goal here was to make it very inexpensive, and at that point, we were trying to solve all the USB problems with two wires. At that point, if you added wires to make things flippable, you have to add wires, and you also have to add a lot of silicon. Wires and pins cost real money, so we decided to keep it as cheap as possible. With serial port and parallel port, there were versions that were 25 pins and 36 pins and so on and so forth. The cables were very thick and expensive. We were trying to solve all the problems. We went in favor of fewer wires. In hindsight, a flippable connector would have been better.

Our goal was to say that this interface should be such that it should work on a mouse and it should also work on a high-end printer or on digital cameras. That’s what we were looking at, the range of products. At one end, we wanted it simple enough, so there could be very low costs. At the other end, we wanted to make sure that it could be scaled and, just as we speak today, we’re running the USB at tens of gigs. The original one was running at 12 megs. We’ve come a long way in scaling.'

Post reply on HN