Maybe the words Universal Serial Bus mean nothing to you, but probably USB does. USB is a port used for any kind of devices now, it has become an standard in the industry and nowadays you can find even the weirdest gadget with USB connection.
USB started in the version 1.0 and it was designed to agglutinate all the different ports existing to date. 10 years ago a lot of different ports existed, basically one per each device but the increase in the number of devices to be attached to the computer made people to think of a one for all port to be used in all the devices and gadgets.
The first USB 1.0 had a rather low speed of 12 Mbit/Sec and was mainly intended for human input interfaces such as keyboards, joysticks, game pads, mice etc… this way there will be saved a lot of space in the back of the computer, full of different connectors for each of the devices. The main developers of this technology were Northern Telecom, Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, Digital and IBM. Each company had a different role in the creation of USB. With the hit of USB the PnP (Plug And Play) devices started to appear, being a great advance for the common user so that it was not necessary to configure difficult drivers for the most part of external devices.
USB 2.0 has a much faster data transfer rate than 1.0 version, reaching up to 480mbit / sec. This has given an even wider span of applications to the USB port. The first version was too slow to allow mass storage devices to be used by USB, but USB 2.0 has fixed that problem and now you can see a lot of different mass storage devices working with USB technology. It was mainly intended for optical and magnetic external devices like external HDs and CD / DVD writers but it has had a very big acceptance in Flash memories such as pen drives.
External mass storage devices have had a very good acceptance in the market because they fix the problem of having to move data from a computer to another. Before the invention of this port, the easiest way to move data from a computer to another was to burn a CD or DVD, having to spend some time in doing it, wasting the media didn’t just to move the data from one computer to another and the hassle of burning media which is not the same as just copy / pasting. The new external mass storage devices are easy to handle, completely PnP and once you have plugged it you can use them as any internal device to store your data.
The future is USB 3.0 which is now in the market but still is not very used by the most manufacturers. It is 10 times faster than USB 2.0 and has an acceptable backward compatibility with USB 2.0, we’ll see in a future if this will work or not.
