this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
531 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59596 readers
3055 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How many other plugs are reversible? HDMI and DisplayPort aren't. Older stuff like scsi, gameports, parallel and serial ports and the like weren't, and could even destroy your hardware if plugged into the wrong thing. Firewire and GameboyLink weren't. Barrel plugs are insertable every way you want, but only have two contacts. And 3.5mm jacks slide over all the pins, which might not be great if you plan on carrying power.
Lightning and USB Type-C are reversible, but that's the only one I can think of. And the inoffiziell rarely seen reversible USB Type-A (when were those first released?).
Biggest problem with USB Type-A is that it isn't keyed in an obvious way, so both directions of insertions look and feel plausible until the thing doesn't wanna fit.
PS: Another thing "wrong" with USB is that Type-B isn't a female Type-A, but a completely different thing, meaning a USB cable can't be used as extension cord and you need a different cord for that. As I understand it, this was done deliberately to avoid issues with cable length and voltagedrop and signal degradation (which you run into anyway when using USB extension cords). There is also the hermaphroditic connector, which keeps the sides the same, while still allows extension cord use. Don't know if anybody ever implemented that.
Most people weren't adding and removing peripherals (and potentially multiple things using the same kind of connector) from their computers multiple times a day when many of your examples were in common consumer usage.
Now we plug and unplug peripherals all the time, and for a great many people those multiple plug/unplug cycles are all using USB, and have been long enough to have plenty of frustration about this.
I don't think Type-A or its creator should burn in the depths of hell, but it's a legitimate complaint for a usage case that most people didn't experience prior to loosely about the time that USB started to rise in popularity, or so my recollection of the chain of events tells me.
Depends, back in the home computer days swapping around joysticks and mouse (and less often lightpens and paddles) was a pretty common occurrence. And over in the console world we had multiple gamepads, multitabs, GameBoy Link cables and the like that also saw a ton of plug-in action.
PC was somewhat special, since joysticks, keyboard, mouse and printers all used different ports, often only accessible on the hard to reach backside of the PC case and sometimes even screwed in. Hotplugging was also not officially supported. Those are however all the issues that USB was specifically designed to fix, so more plug-in action was to be expected.
That said, it is quite true that reversibility really wasn't a concern back than at all. None of the other ports had it, and USB was a huge improvement over previous PC port designs.
I think the big thing with Firewire and DisplayPort, though, is that the port isn't a rectangle. It's flush on one size and angled on the other so that you know which way it plugs in no matter what. It being non-reversible wasn't an issue because of that. USB, on the other hand, has the same shape whether it's right-side-up or upside-down.
Yeah, I don't think the complaints stem from the connector not being reversible but what you described in the last paragraph.
Yep. It's not that it isn't reversible, it's that it's non-reversible contacts inside a symmetrical connector.
Didn't have to be reversible. Just obvious. Both HDMI and DisplayPort go in only one way. It takes fiddling but there's no doubt. With USB it's always you fiddle, doesn't fit, then maybe it's the other way around, doesn't fit, oooh it was the original, doesn't fit... ffs. And they even made the plastic black.
IBM token link connectors were hermaphroditic
I must be dumb cause I still need 3 tries to plug in a HDMI/DP port.
USB B takes 6 tries: first three times in a RJ45 port, then 3 more after realizing I've been messing with the wrong port all this time.
I used to work in a call centre and a lot of headsets use that connected design.
Neat, never heard of that, guess it's not seeing much use outside the professional setting. It's called Plantronics QD.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Plantronics QD
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So, thanks for the PTSD I don't think I've seen those ports in over a decade. Pluging in your headset into those ports was like submitting to torture.
But yeah that's them.
It's really interesting that they never became standardised outside of the call centre industry because really they would have been great in consumer electronics and I'm not sure why they never became popular.