Universal Serial Bus
From Saferpedia
USB - Universal Serial Bus is a standard serial interface to establish communication between devices and computer. USB is designed to replace a variety of special and parallel ports. Thus USB interface can connect various peripheral devices: keyboards, mouse, digital cameras, printers, media players, flash memories, phones, external hard disks, etc. For many of these devices USB became the standard connecting way. USB was designed for PCs but it became a common port for other devices like smartphones, PDAs and video games consoles.
History
The USB was developed and invented by Ajay Bhatt while working for Intel Corporation, and replaced a variety of interfaces such as serial and parallel ports.
The Universal Serial Bus development began in 1994 with a group of seven companies: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. USB was intended to make it easier to connect external devices to PCs by replacing the multitude of connectors at the back of PCs. The first silicon for USB was made by Intel in 1995.
The USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January 1996. The original USB 1.0 specification had a data transfer rate of 12 Megabits/s. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. It allowed for a 12 Megabits/s data rate for higher-speed devices such as disk drives, and a lower 1.5 Megabits/s rate for low bandwidth devices such as joysticks.
The USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000 and was standardized by the USB-IF at the end of 2001. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies, NEC and Philips jointly led the initiative to develop a higher data transfer rate, with the resulting specification achieving 480 Megabits/s, a fortyfold increase over 12 Megabits/s for the original USB 1.0.
- Source: Wikipedia
