Life before to USBs

This is fascinating read regarding our life before USBs. Read the complete information in this amazing article: Only connect There’s almost certainly a drawer in your desk, kitchen, or office that’s dedicated to a knotted mess of wires and cords. They go to digital cameras you haven’t powered on in a decade, archaic iPods with a 30-pin connector, printers that mysteriously stopped working, and maybe even a GPS watch from that time you figured you’d try training for a marathon. That was life pre-USB: unique ports with variably shaped connectors and different numbers of pins. You couldn’t guarantee that your computer would have the correct port for the product you wanted to use, and if you didn’t have one, it required buying and installing a card—physically opening the computer and nestling in the fragile board. This Wild West era of ports came to an end when USBs entered the picture in the mid-90s, and untangled the mess. With a new USB just around the corner, let’s take a look at how these handy (and mildly irritating) gadgets came to be.