USB. It's hard to imagine, but we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device. The plug was huge. And cables cost $50. Mice used an entirely separate interface that was different on Macs and PCs, and since Apple was dying at the time, it was a struggle to get Mac mice for a reasonable price. With USB, you could suddenly attach any device to Mac or PC and often not even need a driver. You could buy a splitter and attach multiple devices. Incredible!
Wifi. I remember seeing Apple's Airport demo. You could connect to the internet WITHOUT WIRES! Magic!
> SCSI ... which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device
Pedantry, but: SCSI is parallel, not serial. The distinction is the number of data lines in the cable -- serial has one line, and SCSI has 8 or 16. This allows for much faster data transfer rates, at the (significant) expense of greater complexity and cabling cost.
The other advantage of SCSI is the ability to connect to multiple devices through "daisy-chaining". Old-style serial connections (RS-232, RS-422, etc) were strictly point-to-point.
Modern SCSI (SAS) runs the SCSI protocol over a serial connection, because port clock speeds are now fast enough that the parallel advantage isn't important for most uses.
Not to detract from USB though. It was an improvement over all of the above, and nowadays it's pretty fast, too.
>we used to have a thing called SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy", and that's how it felt) which allowed you to connect to exactly one serial device.
No, SCSI was worse than that... you had 5 or so different types, about 5 different connectors, and you had to terminate things, set the dip-switches just right, have the right Adaptec card, with the right drivers, and if you didn't look at things too hard... you might be able to take a $5 CD blank and get a good burn on it... otherwise you had a $5 coaster.
I was super excited the first time I personally owned my first SCSI card though. I look back on my fascination with the tech of those days fondly. It was super cool even though it badly sucked by todays standards.
Indeed, I'm running a lab experiment right now, and I count six USB cables coming out of the computer, one of which goes to a powered hub with a further five cables plugged in. Two of the USB interfaced hardware gadgets are homemade. All controlled by Python. A couple of the devices required downloading drivers from the vendor, but the setup process was utterly uneventful.
