5 ms·

I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and have them communicate/transfer files. With same protocol

I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and have them communicate/transfer files. With same protocol in all OSes, of course. Seems like it should have been one of the first features USB could have had since the beginning, imho I know there's something about USB A to USB A cables not existing in theory, but this would have been a good reason to have it exist, and USB C of course can do this Also, Android to PC can sort of do it, and is arguably two computers in some form (but this was easier when Android still acted like a mass storage device). But e.g. two laptops can't do it with each other.

thebruce87m 1y ago
FireWire did the IIRC. When buying a new Mac you would connect them via a single cable to do the data transfer.
- ericwood 1y ago
  Macs still have target disk mode but it requires rebooting. Highly recommend using thunderbolt to transfer over to a new computer!
meindnoch 1y ago
But then nobody could analyze your files... :/
xandrius 1y ago
You mean a cross ethernet cable? Or using Bluetooth? Or using local WiFi (direct or not).
- deathanatos 1y ago
  > You mean a cross ethernet cable? If both machines have an Ethernet port. > Or using Bluetooth? Half the time I need a dumb pipe, it's from personal to work. Regrettably, work forces me to use macOS, and macOS's bluetooth implementation is just an utter tire fire, and doesn't work 90% of the time. I usually fall back to networks, for that reason. Of course, MBPs also have the "no port" problem above. > Or using local WiFi (direct or not) If I'm home, yeah. But TFA is advertising the ability to hole-punch, and if I'm traveling, that'd be an advantage.
viraptor 1y ago
On Linux you can do it by creating an MTP endpoint, like mobile devices do https://github.com/viveris/uMTP-Responder https://github.com/viveris/uMTP-Responder It looks like MS also had one, but only on Windows CE for some reason https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=9332 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=933...
- cozzyd 1y ago
  Or an rndis gadget
clearleaf 1y ago
The incredible technology you're describing was possible on the Nintendo DS without wires and no need for a LAN either. It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved. This dumb pipe thing is certainly interesting but it will run into the same problem as the myriad other solutions that already exist. If you're trying to give a 50MB file to a Windows user they have no way to receive it via any method a Linux user would have to send it unless the Windows user has gone out of their way to install something most people have never heard of.
- elliotec 1y ago
  I mean, windows users install things they’ve never heard of all the time. If this was a real thing you needed to do, and it is too much work to get them to install WSL, you could probably just send them the link to install Git and use git bash to run that curl install sh script for dumbpipe. And if this seemed like a very useful thing, it couldn’t be too hard to package this all up into a little utility that gets windows to do it. But alas, it remains “easier” to do this with email or a cloud service or a usb stick/sd card.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  Pairdrop.net - no need to install anything, transfers go over the local network if both devices are in a LAN.
- kovek 1y ago
  > It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years I guess now you can find the solution that you need by telling the requirements to LLMs who have now indexed a lot of the tradeoffs
- deathanatos 1y ago
  > It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years If we put the requirements of, 1. E2EE 2. Does not rely on Google. (Or ideally, any other for profit corporation.) That eliminates like 90% of the recent trend of WebRTC P2P file transfer things that have graced HN over the last decade, as all WebRTC code seems to just copy Google's STUN/TURN servers between each other. But as you say, > but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved. ISPs seem to be that in set. IPv6 would obsolete NAT, but my ISP was kind enough to ship an IPv6 firewall that by default drops incoming packets. It has four modes: drop everything, drop all inbound, a weird intermediate mode that is useless¹, and allow everything. (¹this is Verizon fios; they claim, "This feature enables "outside-to-inside" access for IPv6 services so that an "outside" Internet service (gaming, video, etc.) can access a specific "inside" home client device & port in your local area network."; but the feature, AFAICT, requires the external peer's address. I.e., I need to know what my roaming IP will be before I leave the house, somehow, and that's obviously impossible. It seems utterly clearly slapped on to say "it comes with a firewall" but was never used by anyone at Verizon in the real world prior to shipping…)
tripdout 1y ago
The USB 3.0 spec does actually support A to A cables, but I'm not sure if any software makes use of it.
0_____0 1y ago
IIRC Apple computers can be put into Target Disk Mode, which lets a host computer rifle through its contents as if it is a dumb disk drive
- pletnes 1y ago
  This requires shutting down one computer (the mac) first, though.
userbinator 1y ago
USB is asymmetric - there's a host and a device, and the latter acts as a polled slave. The use-case of a wired connection between two PCs was already solved years before USB --- with Ethernet.
- genewitch 1y ago
  there are USB 2.0 (and probably 1.x) devices with usb-A on both sides and a small box in the middle that acts as a network crossover between two machines, i've seen them in stores. I've never used one because i know how to set CIDR. And, as others have mentioned, this does just work with usb-c.
felurx 1y ago
You actually can connect two machines via USB-C (USB4 / Thunderbolt) and you get a network connection. You only get Link-Local addresses by default, which I recall as somewhat annoying if you want to use SSH or whatever, but if you have something that does network discovery it should probably work pretty seamlessly. See https://christian.kellner.me/2018/05/24/thunderbolt-networking-on-linux/ https://christian.kellner.me/2018/05/24/thunderbolt-networki... or https://superuser.com/a/1784608 https://superuser.com/a/1784608
- userbinator 1y ago
  You only get Link-Local addresses by default The same thing happens with two machines connected via an Ethernet cable, which appears to be what this USB4 network feature does - an Ethernet NIC to software, but with different lower layer protocols.
  - dwattttt 1y ago
    Crossover cables, get'cher crossover cables here!
    - deathanatos 1y ago
      AIUI, most NICs these days do what is called "auto-crossover"; i.e., they'll detect the situation and just do the "crossover" in the NIC itself. A normal cable works.
      - fodkodrasz 1y ago
        Yes, the name is Auto MDI-X and is standard since on-board 1Gbps Ethernet NICs became the norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Automatic_MDI-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut...
- grishka 1y ago
  Non-USB-shaped older Thunderbolt, down to version 1, can do this too, iirc. But you do need the expensive and somewhat rare cable.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and them communicate/transfer files." After TCP/IP became standard on personal computers, I used Ethernet crossover cable to transfer large files between compuers. I always have some non-networked computers. USB sticks were not yet available. Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers perhaps in hopes computer owners will send ("sync") their files to third party computers on the internet (renamed "the cloud") as a means of transferring files between the owner's computers. Much has changed over the years. Expect replies about those changes. There are many, many different ways to transfer files today. Expect comments advocating those other methods. But the crossover cable method still works. With a USB-to-Ethernet adapter it can work even on computers with no Ethernet port. No special software is needed. No router is needed. No internet is needed. Certainly no third party is needed. Just TCP/IP which is still a standard.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  > Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers Pretty sure one can set up an ad hoc wifi network for this.
  - deathanatos 1y ago
    One … can. I have a script for this myself, but I only set that up after wanting to do ad hoc and then realizing that it was basically impossible to do from scratch. Ad hoc requires an Internet connection to download the knowledge necessary to do ad hoc, and that utterly defeats the point of it all. (Except in how I've now cached that into a script.) Ad hoc requires the machines be in "WiFi shouting range".
    - hoherd 1y ago
      I was about to talk about how online help files are forgotten these days, and should guide you to the right information to set up an ad-hoc network, but I was disappointed three times over by macOS. macOS does not have any offline documentation like pretty much every OS used to. When I turn off my WiFi and then open "Mac User Guide" or "Tips for your Mac", they both tell me they require an internet connection. When I re-enable my internet connection, neither of those apps have information about how to set up an ad-hoc wifi network. When I looked up how to create an ad-hoc network in other sources, I discovered that the ability to create an ad-hoc network was apparently removed from the GUI in macOS 11, and now requires CLI commands. I hate how modern tech companies assume that everybody always has access to a high speed internet connection.
incanus77 1y ago
I realize you are asking for cross-OS, but Mac OS X was doing this in 2002 (and probably earlier) for PowerBook models with an ethernet cable between them. As I recall, iBooks didn't do this even if they had the port, but PowerBooks would do the auto-crossover, then Finder/AFP would support the machines showing up for each other.
Bluecobra 1y ago
You used to be able to connect two PC’s together via the parallel port. I had to do this once to re-install Windows 95 on a laptop with a hard drive and floppy. It was painfully slow but it worked.
- userbinator 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1284#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1284#Characteristics Up to 2MB/s effective throughput, better than 10M Ethernet. Likely it was slower for you due to other limitations.
- exidy 1y ago
  I believe this was pioneered by Laplink[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplink
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    Yup. Used to use this a lot in the DOS era. Copying files between LPT or COM ports. Slow, but worked without too much hassle.
  - genewitch 1y ago
    or [x|z]modem ?
- chriswarbo 1y ago
  > You used to be able to connect two PC’s together via the parallel port. This could be done on Amiga too, using parnet https://crossconnect.tripod.com/PARNET.HTML https://crossconnect.tripod.com/PARNET.HTML I recall it being easier to set up than a dialup modem (since the latter also required installing a TCP/IP stack)
rtpg 1y ago
You can plug an ethernet cable in between machines and send files over it! So that period where this would be useful already had a pretty good solution (I vividly remember doing this like 3 times in the same day with some family members for some reason (probably nobody having a USB drive at the moment!))
dotancohen 1y ago
I actually have a USB-A to USB-A cable. It came with priority Windows software on an 80mm CD-ROM. It wasn't long enough to connect two desktops in the same room if not on the same table, and I just never tried with a laptop because all my laptops have run Debian or some variant thereof since 2005 or so.
defraudbah 1y ago
ethernet works out of the box, i used local lans long time before i knew how to program usb probably works too if you google a bit
jrm4 1y ago
Like so many possible networking/connection nice things that we can't have, you really can directly blame this one on "the companies." Brought to you by the same people that made "peer-to-peer" a dirty word.

thebruce87m 1y ago

FireWire did the IIRC. When buying a new Mac you would connect them via a single cable to do the data transfer.

ericwood 1y ago
Macs still have target disk mode but it requires rebooting. Highly recommend using thunderbolt to transfer over to a new computer!

meindnoch 1y ago

But then nobody could analyze your files... :/

xandrius 1y ago

You mean a cross ethernet cable? Or using Bluetooth? Or using local WiFi (direct or not).

deathanatos 1y ago
> You mean a cross ethernet cable? If both machines have an Ethernet port. > Or using Bluetooth? Half the time I need a dumb pipe, it's from personal to work. Regrettably, work forces me to use macOS, and macOS's bluetooth implementation is just an utter tire fire, and doesn't work 90% of the time. I usually fall back to networks, for that reason. Of course, MBPs also have the "no port" problem above. > Or using local WiFi (direct or not) If I'm home, yeah. But TFA is advertising the ability to hole-punch, and if I'm traveling, that'd be an advantage.

viraptor 1y ago

On Linux you can do it by creating an MTP endpoint, like mobile devices do https://github.com/viveris/uMTP-Responder https://github.com/viveris/uMTP-Responder It looks like MS also had one, but only on Windows CE for some reason https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=9332 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=933...

cozzyd 1y ago
Or an rndis gadget

clearleaf 1y ago

The incredible technology you're describing was possible on the Nintendo DS without wires and no need for a LAN either. It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved. This dumb pipe thing is certainly interesting but it will run into the same problem as the myriad other solutions that already exist. If you're trying to give a 50MB file to a Windows user they have no way to receive it via any method a Linux user would have to send it unless the Windows user has gone out of their way to install something most people have never heard of.

elliotec 1y ago
I mean, windows users install things they’ve never heard of all the time. If this was a real thing you needed to do, and it is too much work to get them to install WSL, you could probably just send them the link to install Git and use git bash to run that curl install sh script for dumbpipe. And if this seemed like a very useful thing, it couldn’t be too hard to package this all up into a little utility that gets windows to do it. But alas, it remains “easier” to do this with email or a cloud service or a usb stick/sd card.
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
Pairdrop.net - no need to install anything, transfers go over the local network if both devices are in a LAN.
kovek 1y ago
> It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years I guess now you can find the solution that you need by telling the requirements to LLMs who have now indexed a lot of the tradeoffs
deathanatos 1y ago
> It's a problem that's been solved in hundreds of different ways over the last 40 years If we put the requirements of, 1. E2EE 2. Does not rely on Google. (Or ideally, any other for profit corporation.) That eliminates like 90% of the recent trend of WebRTC P2P file transfer things that have graced HN over the last decade, as all WebRTC code seems to just copy Google's STUN/TURN servers between each other. But as you say, > but certain people don't want that problem to ever be solved without cloud services involved. ISPs seem to be that in set. IPv6 would obsolete NAT, but my ISP was kind enough to ship an IPv6 firewall that by default drops incoming packets. It has four modes: drop everything, drop all inbound, a weird intermediate mode that is useless¹, and allow everything. (¹this is Verizon fios; they claim, "This feature enables "outside-to-inside" access for IPv6 services so that an "outside" Internet service (gaming, video, etc.) can access a specific "inside" home client device & port in your local area network."; but the feature, AFAICT, requires the external peer's address. I.e., I need to know what my roaming IP will be before I leave the house, somehow, and that's obviously impossible. It seems utterly clearly slapped on to say "it comes with a firewall" but was never used by anyone at Verizon in the real world prior to shipping…)

tripdout 1y ago

The USB 3.0 spec does actually support A to A cables, but I'm not sure if any software makes use of it.

0_____0 1y ago

IIRC Apple computers can be put into Target Disk Mode, which lets a host computer rifle through its contents as if it is a dumb disk drive

pletnes 1y ago
This requires shutting down one computer (the mac) first, though.

userbinator 1y ago

USB is asymmetric - there's a host and a device, and the latter acts as a polled slave. The use-case of a wired connection between two PCs was already solved years before USB --- with Ethernet.

genewitch 1y ago
there are USB 2.0 (and probably 1.x) devices with usb-A on both sides and a small box in the middle that acts as a network crossover between two machines, i've seen them in stores. I've never used one because i know how to set CIDR. And, as others have mentioned, this does just work with usb-c.

felurx 1y ago

You actually can connect two machines via USB-C (USB4 / Thunderbolt) and you get a network connection. You only get Link-Local addresses by default, which I recall as somewhat annoying if you want to use SSH or whatever, but if you have something that does network discovery it should probably work pretty seamlessly. See https://christian.kellner.me/2018/05/24/thunderbolt-networking-on-linux/ https://christian.kellner.me/2018/05/24/thunderbolt-networki... or https://superuser.com/a/1784608 https://superuser.com/a/1784608

userbinator 1y ago
You only get Link-Local addresses by default The same thing happens with two machines connected via an Ethernet cable, which appears to be what this USB4 network feature does - an Ethernet NIC to software, but with different lower layer protocols.
- dwattttt 1y ago
  Crossover cables, get'cher crossover cables here!
  - deathanatos 1y ago
    AIUI, most NICs these days do what is called "auto-crossover"; i.e., they'll detect the situation and just do the "crossover" in the NIC itself. A normal cable works.
    - fodkodrasz 1y ago
      Yes, the name is Auto MDI-X and is standard since on-board 1Gbps Ethernet NICs became the norm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Automatic_MDI-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut...
grishka 1y ago
Non-USB-shaped older Thunderbolt, down to version 1, can do this too, iirc. But you do need the expensive and somewhat rare cable.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"I wonder why it's not standard that you can simply connect two PC's to each other with a USB cable and them communicate/transfer files." After TCP/IP became standard on personal computers, I used Ethernet crossover cable to transfer large files between compuers. I always have some non-networked computers. USB sticks were not yet available. Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers perhaps in hopes computer owners will send ("sync") their files to third party computers on the internet (renamed "the cloud") as a means of transferring files between the owner's computers. Much has changed over the years. Expect replies about those changes. There are many, many different ways to transfer files today. Expect comments advocating those other methods. But the crossover cable method still works. With a USB-to-Ethernet adapter it can work even on computers with no Ethernet port. No special software is needed. No router is needed. No internet is needed. Certainly no third party is needed. Just TCP/IP which is still a standard.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
> Today the Ethernet port is removed from many personal computers Pretty sure one can set up an ad hoc wifi network for this.
- deathanatos 1y ago
  One … can. I have a script for this myself, but I only set that up after wanting to do ad hoc and then realizing that it was basically impossible to do from scratch. Ad hoc requires an Internet connection to download the knowledge necessary to do ad hoc, and that utterly defeats the point of it all. (Except in how I've now cached that into a script.) Ad hoc requires the machines be in "WiFi shouting range".
  - hoherd 1y ago
    I was about to talk about how online help files are forgotten these days, and should guide you to the right information to set up an ad-hoc network, but I was disappointed three times over by macOS. macOS does not have any offline documentation like pretty much every OS used to. When I turn off my WiFi and then open "Mac User Guide" or "Tips for your Mac", they both tell me they require an internet connection. When I re-enable my internet connection, neither of those apps have information about how to set up an ad-hoc wifi network. When I looked up how to create an ad-hoc network in other sources, I discovered that the ability to create an ad-hoc network was apparently removed from the GUI in macOS 11, and now requires CLI commands. I hate how modern tech companies assume that everybody always has access to a high speed internet connection.

incanus77 1y ago

I realize you are asking for cross-OS, but Mac OS X was doing this in 2002 (and probably earlier) for PowerBook models with an ethernet cable between them. As I recall, iBooks didn't do this even if they had the port, but PowerBooks would do the auto-crossover, then Finder/AFP would support the machines showing up for each other.

Bluecobra 1y ago

You used to be able to connect two PC’s together via the parallel port. I had to do this once to re-install Windows 95 on a laptop with a hard drive and floppy. It was painfully slow but it worked.

userbinator 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1284#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1284#Characteristics Up to 2MB/s effective throughput, better than 10M Ethernet. Likely it was slower for you due to other limitations.
exidy 1y ago
I believe this was pioneered by Laplink[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplink
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  Yup. Used to use this a lot in the DOS era. Copying files between LPT or COM ports. Slow, but worked without too much hassle.
- genewitch 1y ago
  or [x|z]modem ?
chriswarbo 1y ago
> You used to be able to connect two PC’s together via the parallel port. This could be done on Amiga too, using parnet https://crossconnect.tripod.com/PARNET.HTML https://crossconnect.tripod.com/PARNET.HTML I recall it being easier to set up than a dialup modem (since the latter also required installing a TCP/IP stack)

rtpg 1y ago

You can plug an ethernet cable in between machines and send files over it! So that period where this would be useful already had a pretty good solution (I vividly remember doing this like 3 times in the same day with some family members for some reason (probably nobody having a USB drive at the moment!))

dotancohen 1y ago

I actually have a USB-A to USB-A cable. It came with priority Windows software on an 80mm CD-ROM. It wasn't long enough to connect two desktops in the same room if not on the same table, and I just never tried with a laptop because all my laptops have run Debian or some variant thereof since 2005 or so.

defraudbah 1y ago

ethernet works out of the box, i used local lans long time before i knew how to program usb probably works too if you google a bit

jrm4 1y ago

Like so many possible networking/connection nice things that we can't have, you really can directly blame this one on "the companies." Brought to you by the same people that made "peer-to-peer" a dirty word.