USB really pissed me off when it appeared. As I saw it at the time we already had a "universal serial bus" it was called "Ethernet" and there were plenty of 'ethertypes' undefined so you could easily make a USB ethertype and define a packet structure that was exactly analogous to what USB defined. You already had cheap transceivers (10BaseT at the time) and you could switch or ignore those packets if you cared to. You could share devices between machines and you could put as many as you wanted on a single "port" until you started running out of bandwidth on the port or ran into latency issues (thinking you would keep that network separate from the IP network for that reason).
Everyone had drivers for ethernet, adding a second port for "peripherals" and even changing the form factor of the plug would have been ok and cheap.
Of course that wouldn't give Intel a monopoly (they owned the USB patents and rights) and it would allow people to innovate without joining the USB alliance (and pay tithes by doing so to Intel).
Everyone had drivers for ethernet, adding a second port for "peripherals" and even changing the form factor of the plug would have been ok and cheap.
Of course that wouldn't give Intel a monopoly (they owned the USB patents and rights) and it would allow people to innovate without joining the USB alliance (and pay tithes by doing so to Intel).
Writing this I realize it still irritates me. :-)