NPR:
For years, Internet users have been griping about the USB, or Universal Serial Bus, and its maddening difficulty to plug in right, even creating memes about the commonly shared experience. Some call it the USB paradox, the seemingly impossible process of making a 50-50 guess wrong twice.
Ajay Bhatt led the team at Intel that created the USB — a near-ubiquitous connection interface that allows users to plug mice, iPods, printers, thumb drives and other devices into a computer. He recognizes that the model has led to frustration.
“The biggest annoyance is reversibility,” Bhatt told NPR. Nonetheless, he stands by his design.
Obviously, it’s a design decision but it’s still frustrating.
Oh, pooh. Considering the Darwin-Award-winner standards that preceded it, I don’t mind that part of USB-A at all.
There are so many other things wrong with the way that USB blossomed into a handful of tiny, fragile mini- and micro-failures before the mysterious idiocy that became unlabeled USB-C/TB3.
The biggest annoyance is a micro plug that isn’t secure in its port, but which goes on to become the standard on ubiquitous and cheap external hard drives drives. The biggest annoyance is a one-plug-to-replace-them-all that doesn’t identify its capacity to carry power.
USB-A was a walk in the park by comparison.
Not one single person who’s ever had to play SCSI-Centipede will ever complain about USB. ( and I routinely get that 50:50 chance wrong twice in a row, although in my defense it’s usually while I’m under someone’s desk, in the dark trying to plug one device into the forest of cables emerging from the PC with just two fingers on my off hand 🙂
I had a chain of SCSI drives on my old Mac 7600 that required the termination to be set on a device in the middle or it wouldn’t work.
Also, I’d cheerfully strangle the bastard who implemented SCSI on the Iomega Zip drive…
If I could upvote this more, I would.
I can get the frustration when the usb port is mounted vertically. That is a design decision that is probably useful for the designer but completely confusing to the user. However, when the port is mounted horizontally, there is no confusion…only confused idiots and people with poor humor searching for internet points.
I put a s sharpie dot on my most used cables. Problem solved.
“Why won’t my SparcStation 10 boot? Why am I getting endless drive exceptions from the boot rom?”
“… oh, the stupid thing is terminated on the motherboard. AND the drive is terminated. FFS.”
Even with horizontal mounts, unless you look at the CABLE END and adjust first, you still have a 50% chance of it being upside down.
Further, research suggests that there is not actually a standard from USB-IG as to “which side is up” for receptacles.
“Empty side down” is most common, looks like, but NOT universal or required.
(The only implied one was “empty side close to the PCB”, but that was never explicit … and that’s not a consistent side for actual application anyway, since you can mount on either side, and also not all USB receptables are PCB-mounted.)
Part of the licensing requirements could have been a requirement to put ports horizontally on devices with a natural orientation, like PCs. That would have solved, say, 80% of the problem on the spot.
ah, the “blame the user” solution. nope. horizontal, vertical, it doesnt matter.
what an amazing, elegant solution. the pinnacle of design. no siree, no problems here.
I design the spec. USB-C will remedy this. And there have been no problems with this solution.
You can get out of your mom’s basement now.