this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
575 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
17 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most people weren't adding and removing peripherals (and potentially multiple things using the same kind of connector) from their computers multiple times a day when many of your examples were in common consumer usage.
Now we plug and unplug peripherals all the time, and for a great many people those multiple plug/unplug cycles are all using USB, and have been long enough to have plenty of frustration about this.
I don't think Type-A or its creator should burn in the depths of hell, but it's a legitimate complaint for a usage case that most people didn't experience prior to loosely about the time that USB started to rise in popularity, or so my recollection of the chain of events tells me.
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.