
USB, Java take center stage at Comdex (1996) - ecliptik
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-12-1996/swol-12-comdex.html
======
ChuckMcM
USB really pissed me off when it appeared. As I saw it at the time we already
had a "universal serial bus" it was called "Ethernet" and there were plenty of
'ethertypes' undefined so you could easily make a USB ethertype and define a
packet structure that was exactly analogous to what USB defined. You already
had cheap transceivers (10BaseT at the time) and you could switch or ignore
those packets if you cared to. You could share devices between machines and
you could put as many as you wanted on a single "port" until you started
running out of bandwidth on the port or ran into latency issues (thinking you
would keep that network separate from the IP network for that reason).

Everyone had drivers for ethernet, adding a second port for "peripherals" and
even changing the form factor of the plug would have been ok and cheap.

Of course that wouldn't give Intel a monopoly (they owned the USB patents and
rights) and it would allow people to innovate without joining the USB alliance
(and pay tithes by doing so to Intel).

Writing this I realize it still irritates me. :-)

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zodiakzz
Most of my ethernet cables' plastic bits break off after like 20 usages.

~~~
numpad0
8P8C/RJ45 is such a massive ongoing mistake

~~~
Miraste
I didn't fully appreciate RJ45's failings as a connector until I had to put
terminate some cables myself recently. I have a new respect for network techs,
because wiring those things is a _massive_ pain.

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paloaltokid
This article made me remember that I had to reboot my 386 as a kid when I
wanted to plug in my new gaming joystick. Those little things make you
appreciate how much more user friendly the machines are today.

~~~
disillusioned
Yeah, you could crash a 386 by unplugging its AT keyboard. And crash later
systems by unplugging a PS/2 keyboard. (Or, really, plugging one back in.) The
fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's USB-A
socket is pretty impressive, but the idea of PNP really helped that along too,
once it finally got going.

~~~
dehrmann
> The fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's
> USB-A socket

This port has survived 20 years. That's incredible, especially for tech. That
said, a lot of things stabilized and matured around that time. Last year, I
installed a modern x86 Debian release on a Pentium II system without much
fuss. Much older and it gets messier.

~~~
zokier
RS232 appeared in the 60s and survived well into late 90s (and still being
used to this day!). Considering how dramatic the changes were otherwise during
that period, it had pretty good run

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gumby
USB appeared to be in motion by that 1996 codex but it took the original iMac
in 1998 to give it the impetus to reach critical mass (and boy was USB
controversial in the case of the iMac).

I would not claim that the iMac gave it critical mass -- that still goes to
windows PCs. But although it was possible to use USB devices in Windows XP, it
was clumsy and there weren't a lot of devices available. Somehow the iMac had
enough significance (remember Apple was still really on life support at that
time) to get enough peripheral vendors to produce devices that it was able to
creakily get airborne.

~~~
flomo
IIRC Windows 98 was released 2 months after the iMac, so Apple has received a
lot of credit for hardware that was probably mostly intended for Windows
users. As the article mentions, it originally was supposed to be Windows 97.
(USB was finicky under 98, but I never had issues with XP.)

The iMac was very much a boon for Apple though, as many older Mac users
upgraded and had to buy new printers, zip drives and etc. This encouraged
retailers to expand their Mac sections, which had shrunk to practically
nothing, and the platform started to look viable again.

~~~
gumby
My impression that the iMac was so important for USB comes from my memory that
most of the early peripherals als came in non-beige versions to be marketed
for the iMac.

That’s my memory, and I was not a heavy user of windows and not at all at that
point a user of the Mac OS, so it’s hardly a scientific survey.

~~~
asveikau
I remember there was a time window where if you bought a new PC you got USB
ports, but the Win95 OS couldn't do anything with them.

In this time and a few years that followed, your typical PC motherboard had a
few USB ports but also PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports and maybe a BIOS that did
not accept USB keyboards out of the box. Actually I still have one motherboard
that is like that.

~~~
int_19h
Windows 95 only got USB support in a series of "supplement packs" in 1997.
Win98 had that out of the box, but it was still missing some things that we
take for granted now, such as generic UMS drivers. It wasn't until 2K that
things were generally working well, and not until XP for most consumers.

But PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports persisted for a long time. I remember it was
still pretty common in late 00s, and the keyboard port specifically is still
found today on some mainboards.

It's not just a compatibility thing, though. For one thing, there was the
N-key rollover issue with USB keyboards for a while. For another, enterprises
like to lock out USB ports to prevent use of flash drives.

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Dalrymple
It seems odd today that as the article points out, Microsoft was so slow to
support USB. Win NT4 never supported USB. USB2 was not supported on Win 2000
until the sp4 update.

Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing
really took its place.

~~~
adventured
> Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing
> really took its place.

They all do their own shows now. Back then individual tech companies were
often small versus the giants of industry (eg GM, Exxon or GE), so they pooled
together under one conference.

Microsoft's sales were under a billion dollars until 1990. Approximately the
size of Splunk today, inflation adjusted.

Facebook 2019 is 30 times larger than 1990 Microsoft.

So now you have Salesforce Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, Apple does WWDC and
other presentations, Facebook has F8, Microsoft has Ignite among other
presentations, AWS has re:Invent and Amazon does various other presentations,
Adobe has Summit, Google I/O. And on it goes.

------
digitaltrees
Halt and catch fire

~~~
sgerenser
First thing I thought of when I read the title. On the off chance there’s
anyone on HN who hasn’t seen the show you should check it out. All 4 seasons
are on Netflix.

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csours
Imagine where we would be if the vision and dream of USB and Java came true.
Sure, they're both around and doing great, but Java is still a pain to update
and it took 20 years to get to USB-C.

~~~
chrisseaton
What do you think the original 'vision and dream' of Java and USB were? And
what does it have to do with updating Java and USB-C?

~~~
asperous
For Java the dream was "write once run anywhere". Today developers have to
maintain different codebases for the native apps, internet, and desktops for
users to have the best experience.

For usb, it was one cord for all serial devices, but there are still many
cords in active use today.

~~~
lonelappde
JavaScript is write once, run everywhere :-)

~~~
colejohnson66
Hence Electron :)

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dang
Url changed from
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961220002252/http://www.sun.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961220002252/http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-12-1996/swol-12-comdex.html)
to a live URL that appears to have the article.

