USB, Java take center stage at Comdex (1996) | Hacker News Reader

USB, Java take center stage at Comdex (1996)

sunsite.uakom.sk

76 pointsecliptik42 comments

USB really pissed me off when it appeared. As I saw it at the time we already had a "universal serial bus" it was called "Ethernet" and there were plenty of 'ethertypes' undefined so you could easily make a USB ethertype and define a packet structure that was exactly analogous to what USB defined. You already had cheap transceivers (10BaseT at the time) and you could switch or ignore those packets if you cared to. You could share devices between machines and you could put as many as you wanted on a single "port" until you started running out of bandwidth on the port or ran into latency issues (thinking you would keep that network separate from the IP network for that reason).

Everyone had drivers for ethernet, adding a second port for "peripherals" and even changing the form factor of the plug would have been ok and cheap.

Of course that wouldn't give Intel a monopoly (they owned the USB patents and rights) and it would allow people to innovate without joining the USB alliance (and pay tithes by doing so to Intel).

Writing this I realize it still irritates me. :-)

Most of my ethernet cables' plastic bits break off after like 20 usages.

Per my comment :-) You probably wouldn't want to use the RJ45 for something that has lots and lots of insertion cycles[1], but there are many connectors that are both positive lock and can support thousands if not millions of connect events.

[1] It also has the risk of confusing network ports with peripheral ports. So pick something "new" (connector wise) for peripherals.

And now your USB Type-C connectors can go all stupid and loose after a few plug/unplug cycles too!

8P8C/RJ45 is such a massive ongoing mistake

I didn't fully appreciate RJ45's failings as a connector until I had to put terminate some cables myself recently. I have a new respect for network techs, because wiring those things is a massive pain.

I am absolutely with you on this. I still think USB is an abomination, and the most modern incarnations only get worse — USB3 being essentially PCIe signaling but messed up because the USB committee got involved. They must ruin everything with their touch.

10/100 ethernet over a different cable and connector type would have worked out pretty nicely.

I find it very difficult to believe that in mid 90s a 10BaseT tranciever (along with the magnetics etc required) would have been as cheap as USB transciever. Nevermind that 10baseT needs two pairs in cable for data where USB makes do with one, making cables immediately twice as expensive. Even if you were to redo the ethernet physical layer, the csma/cd stuff etc feels like more complex(=expensive) than the simple point-to-point host-device model of USB. Overall, the point of USB was not to be good, but to be cheap as to become universal

Edit: corrected statement about cabling

The USB data lines D+ and D- are a differential pair [1], cables should definitely be twisted. On PCBs they need to be length-matchef, too.

[1]: http://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ums_2.htm

Righto, that was me going quite wrong. Doesn't change the overall point though, 10baset still requires twice as many conductors as usb, because it needs two pairs (rx and tx) whereas usb only needs one

This article made me remember that I had to reboot my 386 as a kid when I wanted to plug in my new gaming joystick. Those little things make you appreciate how much more user friendly the machines are today.

Yeah, you could crash a 386 by unplugging its AT keyboard. And crash later systems by unplugging a PS/2 keyboard. (Or, really, plugging one back in.) The fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's USB-A socket is pretty impressive, but the idea of PNP really helped that along too, once it finally got going.

> The fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's USB-A socket

This port has survived 20 years. That's incredible, especially for tech. That said, a lot of things stabilized and matured around that time. Last year, I installed a modern x86 Debian release on a Pentium II system without much fuss. Much older and it gets messier.

RS232 appeared in the 60s and survived well into late 90s (and still being used to this day!). Considering how dramatic the changes were otherwise during that period, it had pretty good run

Mind you I remember OS/X crashing every time I unplugged a USB memory stick.

What version was this? I personally haven’t experienced this since 10.3.9.

It was an original iMac so we are talking about a long time ago.

That reminded me of setting IRQs on my ISA sound blaster using jumpers. I called tech support when I couldn't figure it out and talked to a competent person in the US. Things are so different now.

USB appeared to be in motion by that 1996 codex but it took the original iMac in 1998 to give it the impetus to reach critical mass (and boy was USB controversial in the case of the iMac).

I would not claim that the iMac gave it critical mass -- that still goes to windows PCs. But although it was possible to use USB devices in Windows XP, it was clumsy and there weren't a lot of devices available. Somehow the iMac had enough significance (remember Apple was still really on life support at that time) to get enough peripheral vendors to produce devices that it was able to creakily get airborne.

IIRC Windows 98 was released 2 months after the iMac, so Apple has received a lot of credit for hardware that was probably mostly intended for Windows users. As the article mentions, it originally was supposed to be Windows 97. (USB was finicky under 98, but I never had issues with XP.)

The iMac was very much a boon for Apple though, as many older Mac users upgraded and had to buy new printers, zip drives and etc. This encouraged retailers to expand their Mac sections, which had shrunk to practically nothing, and the platform started to look viable again.

My impression that the iMac was so important for USB comes from my memory that most of the early peripherals als came in non-beige versions to be marketed for the iMac.

That’s my memory, and I was not a heavy user of windows and not at all at that point a user of the Mac OS, so it’s hardly a scientific survey.

I remember there was a time window where if you bought a new PC you got USB ports, but the Win95 OS couldn't do anything with them.

In this time and a few years that followed, your typical PC motherboard had a few USB ports but also PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports and maybe a BIOS that did not accept USB keyboards out of the box. Actually I still have one motherboard that is like that.

Growing up I had an Acer desktop from that era that had USB ports on the motherboard, but they were covered by a breakaway metal cover. Unfortunately I think my parents tossed it a few years back before I had the chance to see if I could get them to work.

Windows 95 only got USB support in a series of "supplement packs" in 1997. Win98 had that out of the box, but it was still missing some things that we take for granted now, such as generic UMS drivers. It wasn't until 2K that things were generally working well, and not until XP for most consumers.

But PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports persisted for a long time. I remember it was still pretty common in late 00s, and the keyboard port specifically is still found today on some mainboards.

It's not just a compatibility thing, though. For one thing, there was the N-key rollover issue with USB keyboards for a while. For another, enterprises like to lock out USB ports to prevent use of flash drives.

No, the early peripherals were the same stuff with a different plug. Two years later, people were copying Apple designs. But they still do that to this day and it is not 'for Apple users', just that Apple is known for great design.

There was probably a certain egotism in thinking PC users weren't buying those translucent blue printers.

> IIRC Windows 98 was released 2 months after the iMac, so Apple has received a lot of credit for hardware that was probably mostly intended for Windows users.

For some reason, a lot of the hardware intended for Windows users came in semi-translucent plastic cases.

Judging by how poorly it was supported on classic Mac OS vs. contemporary Windows, a lot of those manufacturers were probably kept afloat by PC sales.

Besides, it was the late 90s. What wasn't in semi-translucent plastic, those days?

> Besides, it was the late 90s. What wasn't in semi-translucent plastic, those days?

You have your causality backwards. One thing that made the iMac so visible and discussed is that it wasn’t a beige or black rectangle.

To this day, everyone copies Apple's industrial design. So I'm not sold those Braun Iron printers were for Mac users, or just what was in fashion for the time.

It seems odd today that as the article points out, Microsoft was so slow to support USB. Win NT4 never supported USB. USB2 was not supported on Win 2000 until the sp4 update.

Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing really took its place.

The web took its place. Those shows allowed vendors to show off their products to buyers and the media, and vendors really did delay their launches until the relevant shows. Now that is entirely unnecessary.

I got a work trip to a COMDEX in Vegas once in the late 90s. Really enjoyed it, but there was absolutely nothing of value gained.

> Does anyone else miss Comdex? It seemed to be highly successful yet nothing really took its place.

They all do their own shows now. Back then individual tech companies were often small versus the giants of industry (eg GM, Exxon or GE), so they pooled together under one conference.

Microsoft's sales were under a billion dollars until 1990. Approximately the size of Splunk today, inflation adjusted.

Facebook 2019 is 30 times larger than 1990 Microsoft.

So now you have Salesforce Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, Apple does WWDC and other presentations, Facebook has F8, Microsoft has Ignite among other presentations, AWS has re:Invent and Amazon does various other presentations, Adobe has Summit, Google I/O. And on it goes.

> Microsoft was so slow to support USB

It's hard to agree with that when there was a version (the first of two) of Windows 95 available with USB support at pretty much exactly the same time this "preview" article was published. They (Win95 OSR2.1 aka Win98 "B" and OSR2.5 aka Win95 "C") were only available to OEMs, sure, but that's still a year and a half before the iMac's debut!

The linked article is the December 1996 issue (so written in November), and while I can't seem to find exact "release" dates for the OEM-only version of Windows, here's an article dated January 6, 1997 that mentions it and its "USB Supplement to OSR2" package: http://brianlivingston.com/windowmanager/archive/cgi-bin/new...

I can't find a source for this part so please forgive me if my memory is flawed, but I remember OSR2 having only USB 1.0 support and not USB 1.1 like Windows 98.

=========================

"The usbsupp.exe driver is located on the Windows 95 OEM Service Release CD-ROMs version 2.1 and 2.5 at drive:\Other\USB Folder (where drive: is the drive letter for your CD drive). If you do not have the CD-ROM available, you can download the driver from the World Wide Web at http://www.microsoft.com/HWDEV/devdes/usbgame.htm. Save the file to a floppy disk or to a temporary location on your C: drive, such as C:\temp.

To install the driver, follow this procedure: - Click the Start button, and then choose Programs and Windows Explorer from the pop-up menus. - The Exploring window is displayed. - Locate the file USBSUPP.EXE and double-click on the icon. - Follow the instructions on the screen to install the driver. - After Windows 95 restarts, you should be able to use USB devices with Windows 95.

The README.TXT file included with the driver contains information on how to uninstall and reinstall the driver, if necessary. It also describes how to consult the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information on the USB driver."

I definitely miss it. I was 15 when I first went after snagging a convention badge "venture capitalist"

The booths were much more fun too. There was one with a guy getting out of a straight jacket while riding a unicycle and pitching the revolutionary product. That I don't remember

Halt and catch fire

First thing I thought of when I read the title. On the off chance there’s anyone on HN who hasn’t seen the show you should check it out. All 4 seasons are on Netflix.

Imagine where we would be if the vision and dream of USB and Java came true. Sure, they're both around and doing great, but Java is still a pain to update and it took 20 years to get to USB-C.

What do you think the original 'vision and dream' of Java and USB were? And what does it have to do with updating Java and USB-C?

For Java the dream was "write once run anywhere". Today developers have to maintain different codebases for the native apps, internet, and desktops for users to have the best experience.

For usb, it was one cord for all serial devices, but there are still many cords in active use today.

JavaScript is write once, run everywhere :-)

Hence Electron :)

Url changed from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220002252/http://www.sun.co... to a live URL that appears to have the article.

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