USB is the only computing standard that works

Compare USB's evolution to the headaches over DVD standards, HD-DVD standards, and the whole wireless crowd.

One day books will be written on the Machiavellian posturing that continues to take place on trying to establish a "standard" for 802.11n while Airgo Systems rolls out second-generation chipsets that will more than double the proposed 108 Mbps "standard" speed this fall.

The first USB hardware implementations started shipping in 1996 and ended up fully blessed by Microsoft by 1998/Win98. Early implementations were slow at 12 Mbps and the device involved - not bad if you were plugging in keyboards and low-speed devices, but not speedy, either.

When USB 2.0 came out in 2001 it was in a head-to-head competition with the first-generation FireWire standard supported by Sony and Apple. USB ran at 480 Mbps, while IEEE-1394 ran at 100 to 400 Mbps. Of course, Firewire wasn't helped by Apple and Sony implementing slightly different versions, Apple's greed to collect licensing fees, and the expense to implement it in hardware.

By the time Apple had got around to introducing a second-generation FireWire 800 standard in 2003, even Sony had turned its back on the FireWire and was putting the now-generic USB 2.0 into their devices. Today, even Apple has thrown FireWire under the bus with its latest iPod offerings, so it's a USB 2.0 world for everything from disk drives to video camcorders.

So why has USB worked so well? First, the standard was developed in a relatively straightforward fashion by a small group of vendors and thrown out into the open.

None of this dual-party congress stuff with a multi-round deathmatch as the IEEE process has degenerated into around UWB and 802.11n.

Openness has lead developers to build everything from flash memory sticks/keys to silly things like a USB-powered toothbrush. At the same time, people have stuck to the standard in a disciplined fashion without breaking it. Compare that to the freewheeling OS Linux crowd with multi-flavored "distributions" and it becomes apparent that a little too much freedom can be a bad thing.

Perhaps more importantly, vendors have taken the original standard and extended it beyond USB 2.0 into two different paths. USB On-the-Go shrinks down the connector size and implements low-power features so it is easier to implement USB into portable devices, but the big wave will be to move everything into Wireless USB.

Using UWB technology, Wireless USB is targeted to support 480 Mbps data rates at 3 meters and 110 Mbps at a distance of 10 meters. The slow-but-steady plodding of USB standards will get UWB into real products before any of the IEEE committees settle on a UWB standard.

So, I tip my hat to the USB-IF (www.usb.org) for nearly a decade of good works on behalf of the PC community. Maybe it could give lessons to the wireless and HD-DVD communities and save us all a lot of headaches. µ