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Sunday 20 April 2008

How Old is USB?

I couldn't believe I was so outdated.

It was only a few hours ago that I realised that the USB (abbreviation for Universal Serial Bus) has been around since 1996. I had always presumed that the ultra fast port was created well after the new millennium. How wrong was I.

OK, to be fair for myself, I wasn't even 7 by then, and could barely read simple English. While the words "Universal" and "Serial" would have made no sense to me at all, I perfectly understood misunderstood the meaning of the word "Bus".

USB was then upgraded to USB1.1 in 1998 and USB2.0 in 2000. So, if you're still using USB1.1, keep in mind that you're utilising a decade-old technology.

That's analogous to a century-old human. Or a month-old daily newspaper.

Oh, by the way, USB2.0's 8th birthday isn't too long ago. He's getting quite as young as your great-granddad is.

Well, there isn't much breakthrough to the USB family since the advent of USB2.0. No thanks to Intel and Microsoft, the mainpower behind USB, the former giving full attention at dividing their brains into twos, fours, or eights for the past few years, and the latter starting the woes wows by replacing XP with Vista. Yet we should be thankful that Intel has started working on a revolutionary USB3.0, and devices employing this port should appear in the market within a year or two.

And what do we expect of USB3.0? There are some sneakpeak from Wikipedia. Basically it is supposed to be 10 times as fast as USB2.0.

Now we just hope to get our hands on the real thing, USB3.0-speed.

5 comments:

  1. Hello. This post is likeable, and your blog is very interesting, congratulations :-). I will add in my blogroll =). If possible gives a last there on my blog, it is about the SBTVD, I hope you enjoy. The address is http://sbtvd.blogspot.com. A hug.

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  2. Ya, um, thanks but I can't seem to access your blog.

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  3. just for your information, USB 3.0 was not designed by Intel and Intel have also pushed the roll out date of usb 3.0 to 2012...... There are however 3rd party expansion cards are available and also some new motherboards are packing usb 3.0 using 3rd party chips.

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  4. Callum:

    thx for the info! yeah i realised that i was wrong in assuming Intel designed 3.0. either way, it's a shame they won't be widely available that soon.

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  5. Yea i just find it funny that they've taken the Firewire approach! :P seperate bus's for input/output and power!

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