USB had a quite successful precursor: RS-232. The serial standard is now 60 years old (!) and still much more widespread then USB in many industry machines.
RS232 is the electrical signal standard; the chunky connector usually used is a DB25 but basic RS232 can fit in DB9
RJ11 (eg landline) and RJ45 (eg ethernet) were also connectors that achieved very widespread use, as did RG6 (eg cable tv)
(I'm not going to say they changed the world and I'm also not so sure I like the grab-bag nature of the various things the article lists either
for example, 8, 14 and 16 (and more) pin DIP were pretty important, or was it the TTL signals they carried or was it the connecting solder that ultimately made USB valuable... dumb article to write as a listicle.
The letter in the D-subminiature line (aside: they really didn’t anticipate how small connectors were going to become) refers to the shell size (A through E, though not in size order). “DB” is frequently used colloquially as a prefix for any size in the line. There’s also some interesting variants like the DB13W3, which is a B-size shell containing 10 ordinary pins plus 3 coax connectors.
RJ11/RJ45 refer to the connectors and the way they’re wired, together. For example, RJ14 is the same 6p connector as RJ11 but wired to support two phone lines instead of just one, and the same 8p8c connector we’d use for Ethernet but wired for 4 phone lines would be an RJ61.
I was absolutely not being a pedant, because even though I was replying to a comment, everything I pointed out would have fit into the original article; whereas what you wrote fits only into my comment.
I went to the trouble to point out truly salient distinctions between physical/hardware layers, signal/electrical layers, and virtual/logic layers that were being ignored, and thoroughly pointing out technologies that were extremely important to changing the world thoroughly in the ways in which the article was discussing
Firstly, I think you’ve misread: I didn’t accuse you of being a pedant, I suggested you might like to be. Behind a pedant on the internet is sometimes quite fun, but if you don’t want to, then don’t.
Secondly: a common mistake is still a mistake. That shop is selling things with DE-9 connectors, all of which they have mislabeled.
why do you avoid replying to the the main thrust of my rebuttal?
again, I made a cogent argument about the main topic, and whether I labelled a old connector the way many others did is irrelevant to the topic at hand, and if anything hobbles your pedantry hobby horse. Where are your critiques of the more egregious errors in TFA?
You didn’t rebut a thing I said: the only substance of my initial comment was that you had mis-named some connectors... which you did. Your reply contained no proof otherwise, except the shop link which I explicitly addressed. If you’re really asserting that I’m wrong about connector names, here you go:
> Because personal computers first used DB-25 connectors for their serial and parallel ports, when the PC serial port began to use 9-pin connectors, they were often labeled as DB-9 instead of DE-9 connectors, due to an ignorance of the fact that B represented a shell size. It is now common to see DE-9 connectors sold as DB-9 connectors
There are plenty of other sources available, which I’m not going to bother looking up.
As for the rest of your initial comment, I don’t disagree: you made a pretty substantive contribution to the thread, but again I never said you didn’t.
The main thrust of your “rebuttal” is trying to fight an argument I’m not making.
The ones that barf out a debug console from the processor's first init steps are probably not USB internally. ;)
But yeah, USB never came up with a good way to do peer-to-peer. On-the-go is super driver heavy and just not useful in the way RS232 is. New TVs still ship with it, for home automation reasons.
And neither are they RS-232, unless you've got a transceiver (MAX232 etc) in there :)
Man... USB CDC is painful. It's so much "fun" that a serious solution on one product was two back-to-back FTDI transceivers. I think they finally designed that out, but I'm scared to look at what might be in its place now....
I've recently started working with firewire, and man what an interesting bus. You've got isochronous and asynchronous support simultaneously, awesome! But then you get this: "Voltage is specified as unregulated and should nominally be about 25 volts (range 24 to 30)"
Looking at the nearest firewire device on my table, it will certainly blow up if I get near it with 25 volts. It's like USB-C without any negotiation!
I worked on the FireWire driver stack for OS X... and we encountered many incidents of managing to plug in the 6-pin connector upside down. Devices will actually catch fire. (FireWire carries up to 45W (!) at 30v)
Also, isochronous mode is great in theory, but in practice, at least in a desktop computer, the rest of the machine internals are not isochronous so you can still run into real-time delivery failures.
The metal shell of the 6-pin socket has a seam where it's closed, and that can open or loosen with use. That makes it easy (enough) to plug in a connector the wrong way.
One of the nice things about UARTs is that that's pretty much all there is to it. That is, it's about as much pain to implement as to use.
USB CDC is worlds of pain more complicated to implement, but quite easy to use. As long as you don't hit a bug. But USB stacks never have bugs, do they?
RJ11 (eg landline) and RJ45 (eg ethernet) were also connectors that achieved very widespread use, as did RG6 (eg cable tv)
(I'm not going to say they changed the world and I'm also not so sure I like the grab-bag nature of the various things the article lists either
for example, 8, 14 and 16 (and more) pin DIP were pretty important, or was it the TTL signals they carried or was it the connecting solder that ultimately made USB valuable... dumb article to write as a listicle.