4 ms·

That makes it sound like their adoption was the main cause for it becoming widespread. Do you have a source to back that up? It's just not how I remember it, bu

by stinos 6y ago

That makes it sound like their adoption was the main cause for it becoming widespread. Do you have a source to back that up? It's just not how I remember it, but that might be my memory failing and/or being warped.

blincoln 6y ago
This is just an anecdote, but in 1998-1999, the iMacs we bought where I worked were the first desktop systems I worked with that used USB[1]. My PC at the time used PS/2 for the keyboard and mouse, SCSI for external storage, a PC joystick port for game controllers, RS-232 for the first 8-port MIDI interface I ever owned, and the parallel port for my printer. I didn't migrate to mostly-USB until probably five years later, because I had plenty of non-USB hardware that still worked perfectly, and USB 1.x was slow. Mac users didn't really have that option, so I can certainly believe claims that they were one of (if not the) main drivers of USB. [1] ...and, apparently, the first desktop systems that relied exclusively on USB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC).
- bluedino 6y ago
  Ironically it took Firewire in addition to USB for the Mac to free itself from legacy ports. SCSI, for instance, wasn't able to run over USB.
  - dreamcompiler 6y ago
    Indeed. And for people who assume USB's success was due to the iPod, remember that the first iPods were Firewire-only. By the time iPods adopted USB, USB was already popular.
Someone 6y ago
I think it’s hard to make that judgment, but the iMac certainly created a clear market for USB devices at a time when PC users would have to buy an extension card to use USB hardware, but simply could plug in serial or parallel devices. PC hardware, on the other hand, clung to shipping with serial and parallel ports for an amazingly long time, even on laptops, where hardware designers must have struggled with fitting those huge connectors in. In my experience, it didn’t help that Windows’ USB support was lousy for years. On the Mac, you plugged in a mouse. A second later, it worked. Windows found it necessary to tell you it detected a device and had to “search for a driver” for seconds and even asked you to locate a driver about every other time (exaggerating, but plugging in a device in another USB port then before could trigger that) you plugged in a device it had seen zillion times before. I think USB would have won on the combination of merit and being from Intel, anyways, but who knows? Maybe, Intel would have come up with something else. If USB1 had flopped, USB2 wouldn’t have needed backwards compatibility, for example.
- progman32 6y ago
  Heck, Windows 10 still pops up an "installing drivers" dialog whenever I plug in a USB mouse. The mouse does start working almost immediately, but the dialog persists for a dozen seconds longer. One of my earliest fond memories of trying out Linux back in the day was plugging in random early USB devices that were a pain to get working in Windows but worked milliseconds after plugging in on Linux (assuming they had drivers, to be fair).
kalleboo 6y ago
I think it's impossible to actually know for real, but I certainly had that impression at the time. Mostly from how it felt like the USB version of peripherals tended to get clear/blue plastic cases to match the iMac whereas the parallel/serial versions had more traditional designs. There's a similar argument about the iPhone - is it solely responsible for how all our phones look today, or was it inevitable (see the LG Prada)?
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  That's not how I remember it. Every PC had two USB ports. They didn't get used for much because USB 1.1 wasn't great. But they were there since 1997. It was a common question to ask if your computer had "Windows 95b with USB". From 1998 to 2000 USB only devices were marketed primarily to Mac users because it was seen that they were the only ones who needed it. PC users stuck with parallel or serial because they were cheaper, but where possible manufacturers would add a USB port. Then the higher speed USB 2.0 and with it flash drives and that changed everything. Rather than the iMac I'd say it was the iPod that really made USB desirable.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    They didn't get used much because software support was not there. There were issues with Windows 95 and NT4. But also many PCs would stop at POST without a PS/2 keyboard plugged in. But new PCs had USB ports before the software was ready, for about a year or so.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    USB 1.1 was already more than good enough for flash drives, since flash drives competed with floppy disks (way slower and poor capacity and reliability), Zip drives (not much faster even in the ideal case, and slower if they were parallel port), CD-Rs (need burning software so not available on public/school/office computers, slow workflow, slow burning, expensive single-use discs). Although I think the most-sold device in those days of USB were external USB floppy drives for all the iMac users who needed to read floppies. I think perhaps the iMac gave USB the customer base (of people who had no other option) to get the prices of chipsets and devices down to the point where it could also be accepted by the PC market.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
I think it was a combination of several factors: 1. Windows 95 USB support was terrible so nobody used it. But Windows 98 had just come out with good USB support. 2. Some PCs came with USB ports but most didn't. Legacy ports were always present. If you wanted USB you often had to add a card. So nobody used USB in PC-land. 3. Apple's market share was tiny but the "Bondi Blue" iMac (which only had USB ports, not legacy ports) was the first product they had made in a decade that was actually desirable. It was so popular that it made Apple a player in the market again. 4. Even though the Bondi Blue iMac's USB "hockey puck" mouse was ergonomically terrible, it didn't dissuade people from buying the computer, because they could just buy a different USB mouse due to factor 5. 5. Steve Jobs lobbied vendors to make USB peripherals by convincing them they would work on both the Mac and the PC. Which was true. 5 was probably the most important factor. Vendors had hundreds of peripherals ready to go on Day 1 of the Bondi Blue iMac's introduction, and most of them were blue. People plugged them in to Windows 98 machines and they just worked. The surge in USB device availability (plus Windows 98) caused PC manufacturers to begin including USB ports universally. But that surge was due to Steve Jobs' lobbying.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  And no, I haven't found a source yet. I tried. These are my memories of that time from following Apple very closely because I bought a bunch of Apple stock when Jobs came back and I went to Macworld and WWDC a lot in those days.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Mostly matches my memory, but I think Bill Gates was lobbying hard for usb everywhere. Designed for windows 98 stickers required USB ports as I recall so pc pretty much all had USB starting about that time.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    >Microsoft Windows 95, OSR 2.1 provided OEM support for the devices in August 1997. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. Apple Inc.'s iMac was the first mainstream product with USB and the iMac's success popularized USB itself. Following Apple's design decision to remove all legacy ports from the iMac, many PC manufacturers began building legacy-free PCs, which led to the broader PC market using USB as a standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History The issue with USB on the PC side is that USB on Windows 95/OSR2 just never worked properly. People may remember the infamous Bill Gates demo of Windows 98 at Comdex where plugging in a USB scanner to demo Plug and Play crashed the computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wMnU7xbwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wMnU7xbwE When Windows 98 SE came out everything worked fine.

by stinos 6y ago

blincoln 6y ago

This is just an anecdote, but in 1998-1999, the iMacs we bought where I worked were the first desktop systems I worked with that used USB[1]. My PC at the time used PS/2 for the keyboard and mouse, SCSI for external storage, a PC joystick port for game controllers, RS-232 for the first 8-port MIDI interface I ever owned, and the parallel port for my printer. I didn't migrate to mostly-USB until probably five years later, because I had plenty of non-USB hardware that still worked perfectly, and USB 1.x was slow. Mac users didn't really have that option, so I can certainly believe claims that they were one of (if not the) main drivers of USB. [1] ...and, apparently, the first desktop systems that relied exclusively on USB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC).

bluedino 6y ago
Ironically it took Firewire in addition to USB for the Mac to free itself from legacy ports. SCSI, for instance, wasn't able to run over USB.
- dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Indeed. And for people who assume USB's success was due to the iPod, remember that the first iPods were Firewire-only. By the time iPods adopted USB, USB was already popular.

Someone 6y ago

I think it’s hard to make that judgment, but the iMac certainly created a clear market for USB devices at a time when PC users would have to buy an extension card to use USB hardware, but simply could plug in serial or parallel devices. PC hardware, on the other hand, clung to shipping with serial and parallel ports for an amazingly long time, even on laptops, where hardware designers must have struggled with fitting those huge connectors in. In my experience, it didn’t help that Windows’ USB support was lousy for years. On the Mac, you plugged in a mouse. A second later, it worked. Windows found it necessary to tell you it detected a device and had to “search for a driver” for seconds and even asked you to locate a driver about every other time (exaggerating, but plugging in a device in another USB port then before could trigger that) you plugged in a device it had seen zillion times before. I think USB would have won on the combination of merit and being from Intel, anyways, but who knows? Maybe, Intel would have come up with something else. If USB1 had flopped, USB2 wouldn’t have needed backwards compatibility, for example.

progman32 6y ago
Heck, Windows 10 still pops up an "installing drivers" dialog whenever I plug in a USB mouse. The mouse does start working almost immediately, but the dialog persists for a dozen seconds longer. One of my earliest fond memories of trying out Linux back in the day was plugging in random early USB devices that were a pain to get working in Windows but worked milliseconds after plugging in on Linux (assuming they had drivers, to be fair).

kalleboo 6y ago

I think it's impossible to actually know for real, but I certainly had that impression at the time. Mostly from how it felt like the USB version of peripherals tended to get clear/blue plastic cases to match the iMac whereas the parallel/serial versions had more traditional designs. There's a similar argument about the iPhone - is it solely responsible for how all our phones look today, or was it inevitable (see the LG Prada)?

whoopdedo 6y ago
That's not how I remember it. Every PC had two USB ports. They didn't get used for much because USB 1.1 wasn't great. But they were there since 1997. It was a common question to ask if your computer had "Windows 95b with USB". From 1998 to 2000 USB only devices were marketed primarily to Mac users because it was seen that they were the only ones who needed it. PC users stuck with parallel or serial because they were cheaper, but where possible manufacturers would add a USB port. Then the higher speed USB 2.0 and with it flash drives and that changed everything. Rather than the iMac I'd say it was the iPod that really made USB desirable.
- asveikau 6y ago
  They didn't get used much because software support was not there. There were issues with Windows 95 and NT4. But also many PCs would stop at POST without a PS/2 keyboard plugged in. But new PCs had USB ports before the software was ready, for about a year or so.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  USB 1.1 was already more than good enough for flash drives, since flash drives competed with floppy disks (way slower and poor capacity and reliability), Zip drives (not much faster even in the ideal case, and slower if they were parallel port), CD-Rs (need burning software so not available on public/school/office computers, slow workflow, slow burning, expensive single-use discs). Although I think the most-sold device in those days of USB were external USB floppy drives for all the iMac users who needed to read floppies. I think perhaps the iMac gave USB the customer base (of people who had no other option) to get the prices of chipsets and devices down to the point where it could also be accepted by the PC market.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

I think it was a combination of several factors: 1. Windows 95 USB support was terrible so nobody used it. But Windows 98 had just come out with good USB support. 2. Some PCs came with USB ports but most didn't. Legacy ports were always present. If you wanted USB you often had to add a card. So nobody used USB in PC-land. 3. Apple's market share was tiny but the "Bondi Blue" iMac (which only had USB ports, not legacy ports) was the first product they had made in a decade that was actually desirable. It was so popular that it made Apple a player in the market again. 4. Even though the Bondi Blue iMac's USB "hockey puck" mouse was ergonomically terrible, it didn't dissuade people from buying the computer, because they could just buy a different USB mouse due to factor 5. 5. Steve Jobs lobbied vendors to make USB peripherals by convincing them they would work on both the Mac and the PC. Which was true. 5 was probably the most important factor. Vendors had hundreds of peripherals ready to go on Day 1 of the Bondi Blue iMac's introduction, and most of them were blue. People plugged them in to Windows 98 machines and they just worked. The surge in USB device availability (plus Windows 98) caused PC manufacturers to begin including USB ports universally. But that surge was due to Steve Jobs' lobbying.

dreamcompiler 6y ago
And no, I haven't found a source yet. I tried. These are my memories of that time from following Apple very closely because I bought a bunch of Apple stock when Jobs came back and I went to Macworld and WWDC a lot in those days.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Mostly matches my memory, but I think Bill Gates was lobbying hard for usb everywhere. Designed for windows 98 stickers required USB ports as I recall so pc pretty much all had USB starting about that time.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  >Microsoft Windows 95, OSR 2.1 provided OEM support for the devices in August 1997. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. Apple Inc.'s iMac was the first mainstream product with USB and the iMac's success popularized USB itself. Following Apple's design decision to remove all legacy ports from the iMac, many PC manufacturers began building legacy-free PCs, which led to the broader PC market using USB as a standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#History The issue with USB on the PC side is that USB on Windows 95/OSR2 just never worked properly. People may remember the infamous Bill Gates demo of Windows 98 at Comdex where plugging in a USB scanner to demo Plug and Play crashed the computer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wMnU7xbwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73wMnU7xbwE When Windows 98 SE came out everything worked fine.