Who invented the USB - the universal serial bus?

Answer 1

It was invented by an israeli company called "M-Systems" and the brand is called "Disk on key"

If you are wondering about USB the Technology:

USB was first released in 1995 by a number of companies including Copmaq, DEC, Microsoft, Intel, NEC and Nortel.

If you are wondering about USB flash drives:

Many companies claim to have invented the USB storage device bit M-Systems was the one to get the patent in 2000.

Trek Technology and IBM began selling the first USB flash drives commercially in 2000.

All Wrong... the M-systems comment is likely talking about the USB Flash Drive commonly known as the USB Thumb Drive. From my research the Universal Serial Bus USB was known about as early as 1994. The only fact about this is that a number of companies teamed up in its creation, Microsoft, Intel, etc. It was officially released January 1996 and put into production February 1996. USB 1.0 was likely invented sometime in 1995.

Answer 2

Ajay V. Bhatt is an Indian-American computer architect who helped define and develop several widely used technologies, including USB (Universal Serial Bus), AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), PCI Express, Platform Power management architecture and various chipset improvements.

Answer 3

USB is an abbreviation of Universal Serial Bus. In other words, we don't call USB the universal serial bus, we call the universal serial bus USB.

As to why it's actually called the universal serial bus in the first place, prior to the USB interface, computer hardware devices were limited to using the standard serial port (RS-232) or parallel port (IEEE 1284). Other interfaces, such as SCSI, were also available, but manufacturer's quite often provided proprietary interfaces via peripheral expansion cards. This was usually because the existing standard interfaces were too slow. The upshot was that every time you bought a new device you had to be sure you had an interface available for it, or at least a spare expansion slot that could accommodate a new interface. If you had more than one device sharing the same interface, you often had to unplug one in order to use the other. Hot-swapping was rarely an option so this often meant you also had to reboot the system. The ability to daisy-chain devices together on a single port also wasn't always possible as most devices didn't provide a secondary port. Even those that did provide secondary ports weren't guaranteed to work well with the existing hardware. And if you decided to upgrade your computer, you had to be sure it had all the required interfaces for your existing peripheral devices. And certain combinations of hardware became impossible because expansion options weren't always possible.

Thus the industry decided to come up with a new standardised interface that all manufacturers could comply with, and that allowed interconnectivity between those devices via a single port. Thus USB, the universal serial bus, was born. The name is somewhat conceited as it's really just a global serial bus, however the universal nature is limited to the universe of computer hardware devices, not The Universe itself!

It should be noted that by the time USB was fully developed (in 1996), Apple had already developed it's proprietary FireWire standard (in 1995) which was intended to address the same problems as USB. FireWire was standardised as IEEE 1394 and can still be found on many non-Apple products today. However, the industry, as a whole, including Apple, has fully-embraced the USB standard. Proprietary interfaces are largely a thing of the past now that the industry works together to improve the USB interface without rendering older USB devices (legacy devices) completely obsolete.

As well as providing two-way communication between interconnected devices, USB also provides low-voltage power to those devices. Large devices such as printers and scanners still require their own independent power supplies, but the low-voltage can provide enough power to allow connected devices to communicate with each other even when they are not fully-powered, while smaller devices, such as solid-state storage devices, can be powered via USB alone. Devices can also be hot-swapped. Some devices require complex driver software that may require a reboot to be fully-installed, however once the drivers are installed the device can be hot-swapped normally.

Most computers provide at least one hub (with at least one port) that allows several devices to be connected at once (the low-voltage power is shared amongst all devices). Additional ports can be made available by adding more hubs, or by daisy-chaining hubs together. Each hub has its own independent power supply shared amongst all its ports. Many devices also provide their own hubs, thus allowing independent devices to be daisy-chained together. For instance, many computers have a USB printer attached, but the printer may provide its own USB hub for attaching a camera. The images on the camera can be transferred to the computer (perhaps even saved on another USB device, such as an external hard-drive) or they can be printed directly on the printer.

USB interfaces are not the be-all-and-end-all to the interface problems we faced prior to USB. It is constantly being reviewed and improved so there will inevitably be some problems connecting newer USB devices to older USB interfaces. The standard is backwardly compatible, but this may still mean losing certain features within the new hardware -- most notably the speed of data transfers. However, the connection itself (the Type A plug) hasn't changed since it was originally developed.

Not all devices support the Type A due to its large size, however adapters are available to switch between all the various USB standards, including Type B, Mini-A, Mini-B, Micro-A and Micro-B. While there are still some companies that continue to use proprietary interfaces, such as the 30-pin Apple iPhone connector, even they have seen the sense in providing adapter's to convert those interfaces to a compliant USB interface.

Even devices that were never intended as USB devices can be converted to use a USB interface. For instance, hard-drives typically use a SCSI, SATA or IDE interface, but they can be converted to USB by installing them in a suitable USB housing. The housing includes all the hardware necessary to convert between the two interfaces. And although the hard-drives are typically capable of far higher data transfer rates via their intended interfaces, the added flexibility of hot-swapping these devices between computers is often the primary reason for converting them to USB in the first place.