[somat]

Right, the only thing worse than USB was the PS2 port. What sort of madness drive someone to invent a round connector that is keyed.

Hyperbole aside, there are some very good reasons to go with round connectors, it can be very strong and you can put a big nut on them to have an extremely secure lock. however the PS2 connector is nether of these things, It would require a much more robust key to work well.

The worst connector I ever encountered was on a old ATI capture card, it was the same barrel as a ps2 connector but had about 15 pins. Everything had to be perfect for it to insert, a tiny scratch or a slightly bent pin, it was not going anywhere.

[antiterra]

The PS/2 connector was just a mini version of DIN connectors from the mid 1900s. They were sometimes used for printers and floppy drives in place of wider parallel connectors. In general, once you knew where ‘up’ was you could figure out the orientation in a way that is still more intuitive than USB. XLR cables are similar and still widely used, but have more external cues as to their orientation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_connector

[akerr]

I would line up the barrel and then rotate while pushing in until it plugged in. I don’t remember bending any pins. The mark on the top helped until the tower form factor turned the motherboard sideways. Still do this for XLR and MIDI but they’re more robust.

[kergonath]

> Right, the only thing worse than USB was the PS2 port. What sort of madness drive someone to invent a round connector that is keyed.

The Apple desktop bus (ADB) that was used for keyboards and mice in Mac-land was also round. They improved it by using asymmetrical plugs, which marginally helped.