I still get amazed that somehow standard like USB and 802.11 and HDMI not only were assembled but they were adopted worldwide.

My friends some of you don't remember but there was a point in time where if you needed to plug something into the computer you cleared your schedule for the day.

March 22, 2026 - 15:53 UTC

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I think this is one of the best things "the market" did in my lifetime and should always be applauded. They even made apple get on board
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Apple was aboard with USB C before most others. I don’t think MacBooks have had USB A in a decade. They were just slow on iPhone and such in part because people lost their shit over the Lightning switch.

I’m glad they did it on iPhones, but now Windows computer makers need to kill USB A.
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Windows 95
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Plugging in was the easy bit.

I well recall the days of trying to get a mouse, modem and printer working using serial ports where you had to set the interrupts and addresses manually.

It was very easy to get into a situation where the modem would only work as long as you kept moving the mouse.
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Oh I remember. I worked in the computer labs dept of my university in the 90’s. Nothing technical—I was just a grunt that moved shipments equipment around, made repair pickups and deliveries, and most frustratingly keep an inventory of all the SCSI cables and connectors and adaptors and things.
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The cable weighed as much as the peripheral, was 4" across and had 50 pins and neede to be clipped or screwed in to stay in....dang im old
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In Europe we had connectors which were a standard and useful so whatever replaced them had to be the same. So in the US you had, for example, a whole load of RCA jacks, we had SCART which supporter composite, s-video and rgb and audio and control signals. Plug one end in to your TV and …
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…the other in to your VCR. That was it. It carried all the signals. The same for DVD. You could even plug home computers in via it. You could even daisy chain so just one cable between each device. Press play on say the DVD and the TV would automatically switch and even manage widescreen and not.
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As for USB Mac had been SCSI as had many other non PC system manufacturers. Single bus system that worked well. Apple jumped ship to USB fully and drove the market. Eventually USB caught up with the speed of other systems which could then be dropped. A SCSI HD would work with Apple, Acorn, SGI, Sun
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And don't forget having to turn off the computer to plug-in a serial or parallel port and sometimes even a printer.
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I remember having to deploy my SCSI probe…
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Also those three are famously fussy (I think usb might be the worst?) and don’t even get started on Bluetooth

And yet

They have made our lives so convenient that their inherent fussiness is nothing compared to

THE IRQ
and
SCSI
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Bluetooth is very useful, but I think there’s good reason Apple doesn’t use it in AirPods. My portable battery station (the size of a small suitcase) can give you data via Bluetooth but get ornery when you walk away and come back.
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Not if you had an Amiga. We had AutoConfig
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The bad old days.
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In my defense, my request is being interrupted.
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Nope, low latency soundcard card doesn't go in the top PCI slot, it shares IRQ with the AGP slot.

Funny though: my P2 400MHz ran that soundcard with the same latency as my i7 does these days.

Yes, that soundcard is still supported, and new cards though less fiddly do not offer better latency. 🤷
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Still have the box of cords as evidence.
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I used to have a box full of adaptors so i could plug anything into my computer
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Ahhh… good times… trying to get a connection to dot-matrix printer via a 25 pin serial… 😂
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Don't you all get it? Every new abstraction layer requires adoption and royalties. That's where the real money is. Standardization and corporate fuckery go hand in hand.
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Having 3 different CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, according to which peripherals I wanted to use, since "all of them" was not an option
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Installing HDDs was an ordeal where you had to set the jumpers on each drive in the chain and make sure the IDE cable could reach. Now each drive gets its own SATA cable and that’s it.

It would be nice if disk management automatically opened and said, “New drive detected, what do you want to do?”
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Or the early BIOSes where you had to enter the cylinders, sectors etc from the label because it couldn’t autodetect
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I bought a powered USB hub recently and it had a USB-A to SCSI connector and the SCSI side was on the USB hub. I was shocked to see SCSI being used for anything outside of server level components in 2026.
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I was there in the before times. He speaks truly.

Mind you, we didn’t have the Trump regime ‘helping’.
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I’m just glad EVs finally got around to it.
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Drivers. On floppy disks.
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I’ve got a serial to usb and a usb to FireWire do you think it’ll be able to talk through all that
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Please do not compare the actual wonder that 802.11 is to HDMI bruh 😭
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You leave my scuzzy port alone!
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It’s amazing what teamwork and cooperation can accomplish. We don’t even THINK about what happens when we plugin something and it WORKS.
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I heard HDMI has some shady stuff on the business end of things, but at least it works when I plug my TV into my computer and treat it like a monitor. That kind of thing was like sorcery 30 years ago.
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I still have a box of specialised chargers
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No joke. I remember spending hours fiddling around with more than a couple of printers, modems, and webcams. JFC Half my gray hair came from THAT.
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Printers by themselves have probably been the cause of more grey hair than any other modern hardware.
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What we all called the RS232 Non-Standard
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I felt like a wizard because I had one of those..
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SCSI.

Nuff said.
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Don't get me started about Apple's firewire connector.
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Those were excellent.
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The standards that feel obvious in hindsight were someone's incredibly hard fought coordination problem at the time. Getting competing companies to agree on anything is a miracle.
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You had to make sure you got your crossover ethernet cable handy too
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Bent pins, I still have PTSD when I see a connection with pins.
It was mostly a problem with 2nd hand parts, but every once in a great while you could find one that slipped through the quality assurance part.
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The fact that these industry standards all work and provide remarkable interoperability is a testament to modern engineering.
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i still have distrust of USB from years of NT sysadmin. "how can this just work?"
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remember the risk of hot plugging??? not shutting things off to connect...
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The drawer full of proprietary cables and plugs cause no two devices used the same one even when they were from the same company.
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We just became our parents. "Don't throw away that RCA cable, what if we need that some day?" turned into "Don't throw away that USB-B to Micro-USB connector, what if I need that at some point?"
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Yeah and then look for a dongle 😵‍💫
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SCSI nightmare fuel
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rearranging the order of your devices until they all worked🤮
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I have a large box of cables here if you should ever need a SCSI to RS432C adaptor.
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Solder up the correct lead and set the jumpers.
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Oh God, I just got terrible memories of installing a printer on a Dell 😭
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If it was up to Apple we'd still be there.
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And there once was a place called “Radio Shack” where you went to search for the correct terminal.
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I think it's cuz no one has come up with a reason to break them: "Yeah, USB is okay, but with our extensions you can ..."
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You haven't had to figure out whether a USB charger cube was outputting Apple-flavored PD x.y or Android-flavored QC3.0 or whether the cable can actually support "fast charging", and which flavor?
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Yooo!!! USB 1.0, you had to restart your machine any time you plugged or unplugged anything. That used to go for most ports.
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I still vaguely recall connecting our family PC to my dad's work laptop by Serial Cable to play networked Doom, Duke Nukem (and assorted MAME arcade games) with my dad.
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This is because of hard work behind the scenes. People do not realize the time needed for these things.

I even saw a video game journalist recently be surprised by the fact that work was ongoing for the 7G mobile communications even though the 6G was not even a thing yet...

Simplicity is hard work
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The open internet standards we enjoy today were a close thing too. Microsoft tried very hard to de-commodify the protocols and maintain their platform monopoly.
Even today, OSS, particularly FOSS is being fought against in the enterprise stack.
Too much money to be made locking folks into $ farms.
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I still have nightmares about IRQ conflicts in our family’s old DOS system. I think we went without a working sound card for what felt like a year, I just played the game demos that shipped with it with just the sound of the fans and hard drives whirling away.
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Makes one want to terminate and stay resident
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The halcyon days of a game starting and asking for the IRQ of your SoundBlaster 2.0 (or compatible) card…
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I used to have a big scanner that connected by SCSI
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Woe be it unto thee who did not terminate their SCSI chain.
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Honestly SCSI was surprisingly good, given the extreme limitations on hardware when it originated.

You could plug a disk drive, a scanner, another disk drive, and a network adapter all into one port. Which meant a SCSI port cost slightly more than a parallel, serial, or IDE port so didn't catch on.
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Scanners were particularly brutal, very expensive for good quality ones so people wanted to keep them running for a long time but the connectivity and driver situation was brutal. I had one running for a while with a SCSI-USB adapter on a machine we had to designate as "no updates, scanning only."
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OMG !
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I have a couple of SCSI to FW adapters
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despite apple's best attempts to do something else
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Thank you EU
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yep - USB was a long time coming, but man is it better even if not perfect. Parallel Port, original (huge) serial port, VGA, joystick port - the list was endless and different for even many computer systems?
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9 pin serial.
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Almost nobody ever used the other 25-9 pins, and too many things didn't really support more than 4-5 of them.
But hey, that DB25 really did support a secondary data channel, nominally at 75 baud.
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The scale is staggering: nearly 14 billion HDMI-enabled devices sold globally as of 2026. WiFi surpasses 20 billion connected devices, with ~1.2B units shipped yearly. USB ports number in the tens of billions across 5-6B annual smartphones & PCs. The coordination miracle behind this is real!
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How many proprietary CD-ROM controllers were there? I've got the Sony one in my 386.

An entire expansion slot just for a CD drive...
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Plug and pray my young padawan....and before that you took 50 hours trying to find some bbs where some mythical creature might have written a driver that worked with your setup🤣
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Just remember hdmi is copyrighted so every device with one had to pay a licensing fee
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And now USB C and the many many 'flavors' of HDMI are bringing it all back.

Do you have the right VERSION of the standard on both ends? And the proper cable to use that standard? All appropriately licensed? What color is your USB port? How many watts of power do you want to provide?
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Does the hardware makers name rhyme with 'Snapple'?
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Heaven help anybody who plugged in a USB device BEFORE installing the drivers in those early days.
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Bought a used dead-screen MacBook Pro instead of a Mac Mini.
It can do video over 3 USB-C Thunderbolt ports or HDMI,
but there's no documentation that says which ports it's actually willing to display what desktop/screen on or what nonsense happens when you lift the lid. Acts weird on USB.
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On Windows, switching USB port used to require installing driver again: one driver install per port per device. 🤯

I wonder what genious came up with that joke.

Not sure it still does that, I've long moved to Debian now.
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Apple being forced into USB-C is one of the rare genuine political achievements against big business that I've seen in my lifetime.
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My phone still has Lightning on it, but fortunately I only need that for data sync, and can at least charge it with Magsafe/Qi.

My last iPad died when the failing Lightning connector helped kill the battery, and it would've cost $170+ to fix or $300 extra for a USB iPad. Got a $130 Android tablet.
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and the funny part is Apple sent the most engineers to help make USB-C, were the first major OEM to only have USB-C on their laptops, and even had USB-C on their iPad. It was only their phones that they kept lightning.
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Not to fret, the bad old days are alive and well in the embedded/IoT world; you can still tear out your hair dealing with RS232 9 pin connectors and having to build custom level converters to translate 3V to 5V, with a dose of guess and test what magic combo of baud rate will work...
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5V-3V is so much easier - just put a red LED in the circuit and if necessary a resistor big enough to keep it from frying.
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Several trips to Radio Shack
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We've solved physical connectors, but god help you if you need to transfer files from one PC to another on the same damn network.
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I remember adding 32 kb to my Radio Shack, Model 1. I had to change the dip shunts to make the Z80 processor to address the extra RAM. It was very stressful, but rewarded by a 48K RAM killer data processing machine!
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I got a scanner from - I think - ALDI and tried to set it up to work with my PC for hours.

Having both it and my printer work at the same time seemed like a miracle. And that was during the days of Win '98!
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Once the cronyism centered, it was inevitable. No one yet (it seems) realize that was a signal of crisis, not opportunity. Oh well.
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God help you if you dared plug something in before installing drivers, unless you had to plug it in before running the driver install, unless you had to start the driver install then plug in the device at the correct step, unless...
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🤣🤣🤣
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And jiggered the pins
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I'm going to give a shout out to good 'ol MIDI, the little interface that can.

I have a Casio CZ-5000 keyboard from 1985 and it still works great today with other musical equipment and computers because of MIDI.

MIDI is amazing and underated.
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Ah. I remember it well. Parallel ports. 9 & 25 pin serial ports. Setting speed, stop bits etc via DIP switches and software. Checking your serial cable was the right one (straight through or null-modem). And video: there was DVI, VGA, and before VGA, weren't there a bunch of different connectors?
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Oh gosh. Monochrome display adaptor(MDA), Hercules Graphics card, Professional Graphics Controller (PGC), Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA). These seem to use 9 pin connectors, but how you know if your monitor worked with your Graphics card I don't know.
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I had a job interview for a stores job at a university media faculty. They dumped a dozen different cables on the desk and asked me to define their use relative to the correct piece of hardware
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Yes, I remember the days of the early 1990's "Plug-n-Pray" hardware... and DOS command prompts and blocky Windows GUIs...
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...or spent the whole day hunting for the lead that came with the device, as that's the only lead that you could use to connect to it..!
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It’s amazing we live in a world where laptops from different manufacturers use the same charging cable. Hell, it’s amazing that all laptops from the *same* manufacturer use the same charging cable. We should never forget what it took to get here.
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I remember selling some guys a parallel cable so they could copy data from one PC to another - and telling them to keep the packaging intact so they could return it if their plan didn't work out.
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The entire internet exists because of standards. They allow any device adhering to standardized protocols to operate seamlessly.
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Yeah, haven't had to use a DB9 gender bender, or console into a Paradyne device in years.

Don't really miss 80x25 in amber or green, either.

And don't get me started on flipping DIP switches on a Thomas Conrad Arcnet card. Too easy to crash the whole LAN. All 2.5 Mbps of it.

Awesome progress !
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There is an international standards organization which has representatives from most developed countries. My sister was part of it while working for NSA. We found out decades later after she retired.
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Colour coded every device and different pin. Especially printers and their huge cables
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Yup. We standardized on orange (or red) ethernet cables for crossover and other colors for non-crossover, before MDI/MDIX detection made that unnecessary.
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You want more than two serial ports?

I remember thinking the IBM Pc would be laughed at because they wired the back plane interrupts upside down, severely limiting them. And left off the nickel's worth of IC that allowed memory to memory DMA. And the ISA connector at the wrong end.
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You also needed permission from your computer to unplug something.
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Related: When is the last time you read a software manual?
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Today. Sadly. On the web because Apple no longer has downloadable MacOS manuals, or complete web versions,
so I did not find what I needed.
(I read my dad's Mac manual back in 1986, which covered me for a couple decades of Macs back when their stuff used to Just Work.)
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I used to give speeches with the central, and at the time controversial, message that standards (which are regulated) are not ideological impediments to innovation.
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Best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. 🙄
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Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
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Some vendors modified standard connectors to become proprietary.
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I once had a modem with a power connector that was identical to a kb connector (round.) I was moving apts when I remembered I hadn’t parked the HD heads so I mistook the modem power as the kb cable and plugged it into the kb port. A cap or two blew and smoke drifted out. MB dead, me so sad.
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Somehow? I think they made a real effort to standardize these things in the EU, because before we just had different cables for everything! So many drawers full of cables you never needed anymore.
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I too remember the days of "Plug n' Pray". The fact that things were so bad are probably the major reason businesses were willing to sign on to universal standards.
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If only the "U" meant you didn't have to hunt around for a wire that was A on one end and the other was... also A? Mini? Micro? With my eyesight (and a black on black logo) which way up?

Thank goodness A and C now seem pretty much it. Now, which of those sockets is data and which is power only?
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