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).
I find it very difficult to believe that in mid 90s a 10BaseT tranciever (along with the magnetics etc required) would have been as cheap as USB transciever. Nevermind that 10baseT needs two pairs in cable for data where USB makes do with one, making cables immediately twice as expensive. Even if you were to redo the ethernet physical layer, the csma/cd stuff etc feels like more complex(=expensive) than the simple point-to-point host-device model of USB. Overall, the point of USB was not to be good, but to be cheap as to become universal
Righto, that was me going quite wrong. Doesn't change the overall point though, 10baset still requires twice as many conductors as usb, because it needs two pairs (rx and tx) whereas usb only needs one
I am absolutely with you on this. I still think USB is an abomination, and the most modern incarnations only get worse — USB3 being essentially PCIe signaling but messed up because the USB committee got involved. They must ruin everything with their touch.
10/100 ethernet over a different cable and connector type would have worked out pretty nicely.
Per my comment :-) You probably wouldn't want to use the RJ45 for something that has lots and lots of insertion cycles[1], but there are many connectors that are both positive lock and can support thousands if not millions of connect events.
[1] It also has the risk of confusing network ports with peripheral ports. So pick something "new" (connector wise) for peripherals.
I didn't fully appreciate RJ45's failings as a connector until I had to put terminate some cables myself recently. I have a new respect for network techs, because wiring those things is a massive pain.
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. :-)