When USB was first introduced, it really helped to reduce the proliferation of competing standards. USB2 was a good continuation of that mission. Further revis

When USB was first introduced, it really helped to reduce the proliferation of competing standards. USB2 was a good continuation of that mission. Further revisions have brought improvements but lack the elegance of the first two revisions. The current status quo is a rat nest. At a certain point, I couldn’t bear to continue reading all of the details, because it all started to read as a brilliant satire. In that moment, I felt it simultaneously showed both total respect and disdain for simplicity and elegance in engineering. I started reading this to bring myself up to speed on these matter, but I now find myself wanting to avoid all of these peripherals entirely. My confidence about predicting interoperability has diminished tremendously, not just here but with computing in general over the past decades. I suppose this is what leads people to “retro” computing.