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USB Inventor Regrets Making Them So Difficult To Plug in Correctly (mashable.com) 289

Posted by msmash from the captain-obvious dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: While plugging plug a mouse, a phone, or a thumb drive into your computer, you try to stick the USB into its slot, only to find it stopping prematurely. You flip it around, but it still won't go in. So you flip it back to the original position and it slides in without a hitch. We've all been there, and the inventor of the USB sees our pain. Ajay Bhatt, the leader behind the IBM team that gave us the USB in the mid-'90s, revealed in an interview with NPR Friday that he is well aware of the annoyances the public has with USB, or Universal Serial Bus, but there's a reason it's designed the way it is.

"The biggest annoyance is reversibility," Bhatt told NPR. For outsiders, it seems like designing the USB so it can be reversible would be an easy fix to everyone's problems, so no matter which way you stick it in it's a success. Bhatt told NPR that would have doubled the cost of the technology, requiring double the wires and circuits. Another option that the Intel team floated was a round design, but that would have been even more difficult to plug in correctly. Although the rectangle design we all know was ultimately chosen and adopted by pretty much every hardware manufacturer since Apple first put USB ports into its computers in 1998, Bhatt acknowledges that there may have been a better way. "In hindsight, based on all the experiences that we all had, of course it was not as easy as it should be," Bhatt said.
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USB Inventor Regrets Making Them So Difficult To Plug in Correctly More

USB Inventor Regrets Making Them So Difficult To Plug in Correctly

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  • Sure, it is a difficult problem, but given the number of instances this was expected to be deployed in, you would expect a bit more care.

    • Worse then that, "A group of seven companies began the development of USB in 1994: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel." - It was screwed up by a supergroup of nerds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      The "problem" have been solved before by using round connectors, like the 3.5mm stereo connector. How many times have you had a problem plugging in a headphone jack unless you were totally wasted or blindfolded?

      Of course then someone would have plugged in their headset directly into the USB port. But that would have been resolved with a different size of the jack and plug.

      • But that would have been resolved with a different size of the jack and plug.

        Which Apple would have promptly abandoned in favor of its own connector or doing away with the connection like they've done on their phones.

      • USB has 4 wires including 5V and ground. You could make a connector and plug with four contacts, but you run the risk of shorting the 5V or ground to one of the other connections when you insert or remove the plug. I think.

        • Put the ground on the tip and the +5v on the outer ring so it makes contact last. No accidental power on a data line nor can bus-powered devices be in a "running but unable to communicate" state due to a loose cord.

          • Put the ground on the tip and the +5v on the outer ring so it makes contact last.

            You have it backwards. The tip will briefly contact every connection going into the jack, so you do not want power on any of them. The thing it contacts last should have the +5. The normal ground connection should be ground. Always.

            But the solution is much easier than that. It doesn't take "double the wires and circuits". You make the jack with one set of contacts on one side and the same on the other -- two "boards" with a space in between. The plug is a single board with one set of contacts that can con

      • There's this shape called an isosceles triangle...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      I'm pretty sure IBM's philosophy in the 90's and 00's was "Design something cool, and find a way to screw it up". So many "Wow, this is awesome" followed by "by WTF did you guys do ______ to it?" I remember their first 1U x86 server, and I'm pretty sure it was THE first 1U x86 server from the big 4 at the time. Customers were all over themselves to get them. Until they got them, and discovered that they were not field serviceable (they had an open PSU, so you were not supposed to remove the cover in the fi
  • Female USB connectors contain a plastic tongue that's relatively easily broken. Why didn't they just make them a rectangular slot on the device with flat contacts on both sides? The cable would have the tongue with slightly springy contacts on both sides, putting all of the breakable/wear parts on the (cheap!) cable itself.

    • My son actually fried my computer thanks to a broken USB slot. The plastic tongue had come off leaving just the metal prongs. My son tried to plug in my computer (without looking at what he was doing) and the power cord went into the USB slot by accident. A metal prong in the USB slot entered the power cord's hollow center and made a connection. Instantly, my computer shut off and wouldn't boot back up. Basically, it connected the circuit and fried the motherboard. (Thankfully, the hard drive was fine. I wa

      • He probably didn't fry the computer.

        My daughter had a similar event with her computer. I realized that the problem was that the 5V connectors were shorted out, so the motherboards's 5V supply was shorted out. I separated the connectors and filled the now useless socket with epoxy to stop it happening again and the computer was used for a long lime afterward.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by syn3rg ( 530741 )

        My son learned a lesson about looking where you plug things in ...

        That will come in handy when it's time to have The Talk.

      • My son actually fried my computer thanks to a broken USB slot.

        Let me get this straight, so your son was holding a power cord that at one end was plugged into the mains, and then tries to connect the other while the cord was powered ?

        There are so many ways this could have gone wrong.
        (Well unsless it's a car charging cable that needs proper handshake between the charger and vehicle before letting the power flow).

        My son learned a lesson about looking where you plug things in

        He should also have learned to avoid manipulation mains-powered cables. The proper sequence would be plug the device-end first and then and only then plug the o

        • You're over-dramatizing, but then again, you say "mains". Are you from the UK where all 13A outlets have to have little switches on them? In the US, stuff gets unplugged and plugged in under power all of the time -- connecting a connector in back of a computer under power isn't generally much worse than plugging into a wall outlet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *

      relatively easily broken

      I've never broken one in my life. Define "relative"?

  • Why are usb cable plugs all female (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @10:55AM (#58813608)

    A huge part of why the whole situation os so screwed up is that all of the USB cable plugs are female.

    So have these vary small connectors (except for USB-A), and having them all be hollow means they are extremely fragile and if you force it even a little bit the cable end is loose for all eternity. I have that situation with a PS4 cable I bought, somehow I pulled on it or pushed on it wrong and now it falls off the controller at a glance.

    Compare that to all of the connectors people love - various audio jacks are mostly male on the cables, they plug in with a satisfying feel and are durable as heck. Apple's Lightning connector, which works extremely well and is also extremely durable, is just as nice and robust to use.

    USB-C is better for sure because at least you can use it in either orientation so there is not as much of a forcing issue - but again the cable ands are somewhat delicate and you have a thin slot inside the device you are plugging into which I can see getting damaged in ham-fisted attempts at pushing in a USB-C connector.

    I am glad everything is going to USB-C at it really is better to have everything on one standard, but I am a little sad Apple will have to move away soon from Lightning for the phones, even though it means fewer cables when I travel.

    Maybe the USB group could invent an "inverted USB-C" standard that would essentially be "Lightning for Everyone".

    • Re:Why are usb cable plugs all female (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:14AM (#58813738) Homepage Journal

      Making the cables use female plugs is the best choice. If the cable is male and it breaks then chances are part of it will end up stuck inside the computer, i.e. it damages the expensive bit.

      Cables are cheap, and you want them to break first. USB is actually decently robust, having a metal shield that helps guide the cable in straight before it comes into contact with the plastic part and electrical contacts.

      Apple's Lightning connector is inside out. If you shear it off the tip can get stuck inside your phone and is very difficult to remove. Also, because the contacts are against the outer edges, it's got less electrical shielding. With USB you have the metal shield of the connector and the metal shield of the plug, connected to the internal shield of the cable, and as such you get extremely high data rates and native support for stuff like HDMI. Lightning can't do that, Apple had to make an HDMI dongle with VNC to HDMI processor in it.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by c ( 8461 )

        Apple's Lightning connector is inside out. If you shear it off the tip can get stuck inside your phone and is very difficult to remove.

        Yeah, but that's only an issue if you use a Lightning connector in an situation which might see a lot of stress and abuse, like for headphones. Surely nobody would do that?

      • If you shear it off the tip can get stuck inside your phone and is very difficult to remove.

        In practice that doesn't happen, and if it did you could use needle-nosed pliers to pry it out. I have never had that happen to any Lightning cables I have owned, nor have I had any friends that ever happened to. Basically the way cables are the material beyond the plug would sheer off long before the tounge inside the port did, it's very easy to make that part strong enough you cannot easily break it off.

        How many

      • If a male end gets stuck, it's easy to remove it from the expensive bit. Just use a pin bent into a small hook to pull it out.

        OTOH, with the current design, the male end on the computer can actually break off, damaging the port forever. Making the cables female was a stupid design choice.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          To break in inner part of the USB-C port you would have to apply enough pressure to deform the metal housing, in which case you have probably ripped it off the PCB anyway.

          With Lightning you only need to apply enough force to break the thin plastic that the end of the cable is made from.

          • I can't speak to USB-C ports, but I've certainly seen USB-A ports with broken inner tongues. And the USB-C inner parts are a lot thinner and more breakable.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Yeah, unfortunately USB-A is large enough that you can shove things in there to damage it, including micro USB and USB-C plugs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      A huge part of why the whole situation os so screwed up is that all of the USB cable plugs are female.

      We could switch to Boy George [wikipedia.org] genderless connectors. If that's what gets you off.

    • The idea behind that was that when people inevitably did something stupid, they were more likely to end up with a broken replaceable cable instead of a un-fixable soldiered port

      • The idea behind that was that when people inevitably did something stupid, they were more likely to end up with a broken replaceable cable instead of a un-fixable soldiered port

        I agree that was the theory, but the reality is this - with USB both the computer AND cable connectors are more delicate, and either side may be likely to develop issues.

        We know from the data on hundreds of millions of iPhones now, that a male connector on the cable is simply more durable all around. I've never had an issue with a L

        • Comparing USB to Lightning is not exactly fair as Lightning is several times more expensive and was specifically designed for mobile devices requiring constant plug-unplug. USB did not have the advantage of a vendor lock-in and its main goal was to replace the myriad of ports, many of them proprietary which plagued the PC world. To do so it had to be as cheap as possible to enure widespread adaptation

          • I agree about the original USB design, there was for sure cost consideration there so fair enough, that gets a bit of a pass (though the agony it has caused over a decade or so is no less real, and I think there's an argument to be made it was a bad tradeoff even then).

            However where I get off the acceptance train for sure is USB-C. Here they had a chance to make the connector RIGHT, to make the cable end male and the whole system more reliable. But they chose to instead just take on the reversibility aspec

            • Since over 2/3 of smartphones are sold in the developing world, usb-c was also under pressure to be as cheap as possible. The same trade-off was made, a cheap flimsy plug that's much more likely to break then the port when abused. It is also much more likely to break under normal use compared to Lightning but being so much cheaper it doesn't bite so hard when you need to replace it

  • Not actually a big deal (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24, 2019 @10:55AM (#58813614)

    Too much is made of reversibility. USB devices, initially, were not plugged in / unplugged as often as today. The connector was also tons better than many of the alternatives at the time.

    USB spec mandates the USB logo on the top of the plug. Not all cable manufacturers follow this and when they do it isn't always very visible. But it makes this problem quite simple. It is crazy how many people don't know about the logo on the cable, but it would be quite easy to solve by having it more visible and having a note on the package.

    What is nuts is plugging in random devices to your computer port or plugging in your phone into a random USB port. People may have gotten more used to USB charging than USB data transfer and don't realize you are plugging in unknown harder into a computer bus that can do anything.

    • Top becomes left or right if the slots are 'portrait' oriented and there's more left-right confusion if you're reaching behind the device!

      The 18 USB sockets across my desks PC,monitor & external drive are all rotated/portrait as are the several NAS boxes USB expansions. Only my XBox1 actually has a top to match with - but only after I sat it flat after an office tidy.

  • The funniest thing about USB is that its connectors [cablestogo.com] are anything but universal. We already have a dozen of them.

  • It was so difficult and unforseeable . . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SEE ( 7681 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:03AM (#58813672) Homepage

    . .. that people didn't come up with the idea of keying the shape until 1952. [wikipedia.org]

    Seriously, the lack of reversibility is excusable, but the failure to visibly key the external shape was not.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Seriously, the lack of reversibility is excusable, but the failure to visibly key the external shape was not.

      My personal favorite was the original IDE cables... notch? No notch. [computerhope.com] Pin 1 indicator? All gray. [wpclipart.com] Though I suppose you weren't supposed to plug and unplug them very often, the design was almost an insult saying you must be a computer technician and track the twists and turns of the cable to do it right.

      • Posting to undo mistaken mod. I remember these as the bane of my existence when I started as a technician during college. When the red pin 1 indicator cables came out it almost felt like cheating.

        I also look forward to lecturing upcoming whippersnappers on setting master/slave/cable select jumpers.

      • Back in the bad old days of IDE there were a lot of unkeyed cables (without even a stripe, let alone a physical key) and unshielded headers without even a key mark silkscreened on the board. What's more, it wasn't all that unusual to not even have the connectors numbered! You'd have to find the square solder mask on the back side of the board! Most of my hardware was cheap crap, especially at the time (what with ATA drives being new and all) so that surely led me to encounter more of that kind of thing than

  • If you are a developer, the biggest annoyance is the number of connectors in this allegedly universal bus [wikipedia.org].

  • Also design the next one so it aligns and glides in in the dark, kthxbie.

    • Yeah, this. The thing that sucks worst about USB is that it's square, there's no taper. Even D-Sub has a taper. If it had a taper, then the problem of thinking you have it flipped over the wrong way when you in fact have it right but the plug is just hanging up on the edge of the socket would be at least reduced, if not eliminated. They managed to get this wrong even on Type C.

  • It's a pretty simple fix and it's surprising hardly anyone bothers but all it needs is some kind of tactile or visual indicator of which side is the top. Easy. Besides, a 50/50 chance doesn't seem like it makes it especially difficult even if they do start in some kind of super position most times.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The USB standard specifies that there should be some marking on the top side of the cable, usually the USB logo. Unfortunately with cheap cables it's either omitted or it's just moulded into the plastic and almost invisible.

      At the time it wasn't bad compared to other connectors of the day. PS/2 was round and difficult to correctly align. D-types were nearly as bad a USB, slightly easier to see but not by much. The software side which a much bigger screw-up.

      • At least with usb its one way or the other, trying to line up a ps/2 blind was frustrating at best and likely to result in bent pins at worst lol
  • As another poster pointed out, compliant devices have the USB logo on the top of the plug, so just by looking at that you know how to plug it in.
    Yeah, there are non-compliant devices that for some reason have the logo on the wrong side for no apparent reason.
    But can't blame usb consortium for that.
    • After rereading the logo guidelines maybe I'm wrong and it isn't a strict requirement.
      I thought I had read it somewhere, but can't find it anymore.
      Most vendors do follow this convention though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by starless ( 60879 )

      compliant devices have the USB logo on the top of the plug, so just by looking at that you know how to plug it in.

      Except if you're: plugging something in the back of your computer it's hard to see; if the USB port is sideways, it's not so
      clear which is the "top"; manufacturers often put their logo on the other side, which makes it harder to tell which is the top from a
      very quick glance (i.e. you can't just look to see which side has markings on it)...

  • "640 plug-in retries ought to be enough for anybody"

  • Should we expect any less of the company that designed the beautiful token ring connector?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • When he dies, put him in his coffin upside down.

  • Although the rectangle design we all know was ultimately chosen and adopted by pretty much every hardware manufacturer since Apple first put USB ports into its computers in 1998, Bhatt acknowledges that there may have been a better way.

    My company had a Compaq Presario 3020 in 1996 that had USB, but it wasn't a problem because nobody made USB peripherals until the iMac popularized the connector two years later. :D

  • Meh... fancy BS (Score:3)

    by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @11:35AM (#58813868)

    Even as a UI enthusiast, I've never been a fan of reversible designs as it indeed makes them more expensive and adds extra wires that makes the plugs larger. Hermaphroditic cables are just wasteful and over-engineered. This is especially true with tiny, fine-pitch designs, as it just increases the likeliness that things will wear, cross-talk, and even short out. Even mobile cables need to be robust, not fancy.

    Face it, we've never had trouble plugging in DB9, RJ45, or HDMI. The real problem is that USB and SATA are perfect rectangles. Even worse, it IS actually possible to plug in a USB cable upside-down with enough force. I've seen people do it without even breaking the connectors, so it's easy to think it's plugged in correctly when it isn't. Try doing that with HDMI.

    • Agreed, non-reversible isn't the problem. They're just trying to do the slight-hand trick to make the public think so ... and that it's all solved now, so if they just pay for that upgrade ... for every device.

      But since USB-C is so fragile, then there'll be another round of "upgrades" to USB-D in a few years.

    • "adds extra wires that makes the plugs larger."

      This is not inherent to reversible designs. Even USB-C only requires two wires left unconnected due to reversing (the second USB 2.0 pair).

      "we've never had trouble plugging in DB9, RJ45, or HDMI."

      This claim indicates a lack experience plugging things into the back side of equipment. (BTW, the 8P8C socket for that RJ45 will accept the 6P4C or 6P2C plug for an RJ11.)

      • Two wires left unconnected is more than zero wires left unconnected. So seems to go against your point. To make a two-wire system reversible, you need to use at least three wires (50% overhead). As the number of wires goes up, you can start to be more creative to cut down the percentage. You can of course get very creative if you use GPIO pins that can toggle between inputs and outputs but then you end up very complicated firmware.

  • I am not a USB engineer, but
    ""The biggest annoyance is reversibility," Bhatt told NPR. For outsiders, it seems like designing the USB so it can be reversible would be an easy fix to everyone's problems....Another option that the Intel team floated was a round design" ...seems pretty stupid?
    Reversibility IS slightly hard, so that means the solutions are slightly more expensive.
    Round is even HARDER to plug in correctly, as you have 360+ "initially appearing correct" orientations, instead of the 2 USB has toda

  • No - just define the standard so that the +/- power might be reversed (or use AC power) and the data pair might have it's legs crossed. Make the client figure it out.
  • It's funny, cause I think they got it right on the other end, the USB A connection. It's keyed and pretty sturdy.
  • “Bhatt told NPR that would have doubled the cost of the technology, requiring double the wires and circuits.”

    Not really, some steering diodes on the power lines and a bi-directional databus to transfer data.

  • Bhatt told NPR that would have doubled the cost of the technology, requiring double the wires and circuits.

    This is BS. Adding a second set of contacts would not require redundant circuits. The added contacts could simply be connected in parallel with the first set of contacts.

    In a similar vein, I'm often annoyed by magnetic stripe readers such as the ones on gas pumps, with their sometimes hard-to-interpret drawings of card orientation. For a small additional cost these could be made to work in either orientation by adding another magnetic head on the opposite side.

  • Seriously? Is this something that needs to be "fixed" at all? It's a First World Problem. Move on.

    • I'm not interested in why cavemen eat mud. I'm proud of living in a civilized country and helping to improve it; advancing the top end of technology is the only long term path to human well-being.

  • While we are on this topic, I have always wondered why it is called Universal SERIAL Bus?
    Not only are their more than 1 pin/wire, but there is more than 1 data line.

    Am I completely crazy, or does that not make it parallel? What am I missing? But then the old serial cables back in the day still had like 8 pins, so I have no idea what is going on.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      If the data is sent one bit at a time, it is a SERIAL connection. If mutiple bits are sent at one time it is a PARALLEL connection. It has nothing to do with the number of wires physically required to implement the connection. Both USB and the old serial cables are indeed serial.

  • Just put a bump on the "up" side of the USB plug. Then should have recommended that in the majority of cases, the bump should face up or towards a particular direction such as towards the front of the unit or to the left. That way your thumb would locate the bump and orient it correctly.

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