No, this was always an issue, even in times when you enjoyed yourself with incompatibilities between different RS-232 implementation, VGA cables, DVI digital/an

No, this was always an issue, even in times when you enjoyed yourself with incompatibilities between different RS-232 implementation, VGA cables, DVI digital/analogue mess, FireWire burning out ports and more. The world where a plug was enough to identify underlying protocol in 100% of never fail cases never existed. However, nostalgia deletes enough memory for us to whine about times that never existed ;)