The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, as it's more commonly known, is a standardized port developed to connect a wide

variety of accessories and peripherals and other devices like mice and printers and monitors

and monitors and music players to personal computers. The USB standard was released in 1996,

and I'm old enough to remember a time when USBs were new,

and most desktop computers still had a crazy assortment of ports and docks and little holes that were unlabeled, into which you were supposed to plug who knows what, which in turn required computer owners to learn

what the dictionary of obscure symbols

that labeled these ports meant,

while also acquiring a collection of exotic single-purpose cables

so they could connect their inputs and accessories

to their cord-laden central computer tower.

So rather than further dooming computer users to forever own a drawer full of cables,

one for each of their devices, which only worked with that specific device type,

and which could only plug into that precisely shaped

hole on the back of their desktop tower, a group of seven companies, Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel,

Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel came together in 1994 to develop one connector and connector standard to rule them all,

something that would work across all their devices and computers,

and something that would allow for the transfer of both data and power between devices.

This would also, it was hoped, simplify the production of hardware, since they wouldn't need so many ports and could therefore mass produce USB components.

And this would potentially make their products more accessible, since you wouldn't need to dig through your computer's manual to figure out which of the 20 cables you received with it would allow you

to connect the keyboard to your machine. The original 1.0 version of the USB, which came out in

1996, allowed for 1.5 megabits per second at what was defined as the low speed threshold, and 12 megabits per second at what was defined as the low-speed threshold, and 12 megabits per second at the

full-speed threshold. This meant that device makers could build USB components and cables,

...