Millions of people despair every day: The correct insertion of the USB stick. Now co-developer Ajay Bhatt reveals why.
Almost everyone has one, it’s small and you can take it with you everywhere: the USB stick. Almost 20 years ago, the little everyday helper conquered the world – a success story that continues to this day. But there is a shadow on this success: The chance of correctly inserting a USB stick is only 50 percent, which is why every second attempt fails. It feels like it never works the first time. Ajay Bhatt, who invented the data carrier, can explain why.
in one Interview with Design News he explains that it was all about money. When creating a suitable storage medium, the development team already knew that a plug-in connection was not the optimal solution. However, a rotatable connector would have been significantly more expensive and involved in the development process – the team decided against it, even though they knew that this would lead to operating horror.
Worldwide conquest
“If paying a lot of money up front for an unproven technology, it might not work. That was our fear. In the beginning you have to be really cost-conscious‘ Ajay Bhatt explains the cost savings to DesignNews. “In retrospect, you can say it could have been better. But compared to where we were with serial and parallel ports, USB was significantly better,” the developer explains the team’s decision at the time.
But he also admits, “Even if we’re still looking at USB today, it would have been a lot easier if we’d made it reversible.” This might have allowed the developers to focus on other things. “We could have focused on a higher data rate to start like Firewire. They were at 100MB while we were at 12MB,” says Bhatt.
However, it did not harm the USB stick: After all, the low price is possibly also an important reason why the data medium was able to start its global triumph. The first sticks were fairly affordable at around $50 (and just 8 megabytes of storage). Even today’s sticks are still affordable, even if the storage space has more than doubled. There are hardly any sticks with less than 4 gigabytes of memory, which is of course due to the large amounts of data that we want to transfer. If you want to transport a large number of videos or photos, you can use inexpensive sticks with up to 512 GB. There are already variants with 1 and 2 terabytes, but if you want to transport such large amounts of data, you should use an external hard drive. These are often cheaper than the Super USB sticks.
Also interesting: That’s why the memory of the hard drive is always smaller than stated
The invention of the USB stick
Incidentally, we owe the invention of the USB stick to a Power Point presentation. Dov Morans wanted to make a presentation to major investors in 1998. However, this failed because his notebook hard drive gave up the ghost. This misery was the birth of the USB stick, because it inspired the businessman for the idea of a storage medium that everyone can easily carry around with them. His invention was “DriveOnKey” called. In doing so, he combined the advantages of two existing technologies: Flash and USB.
Also interesting: Does a USB stick with data weigh more?
USB-C does everything differently
Thanks to the introduction of USB-C, however, the problem described will soon be completely resolved. Because with the new standard, it doesn’t matter which way you turn the plug. Many modern smartphones or new laptops already have USB-C sockets installed. In addition to being easier to use, the standard also has other advantages. Because USB-C can replace the jack socket for headphones, function as a connection for the power supply and support the DisplayPort standard, i.e. Ultra HD/4K screens.