A few years ago, you would plug in your mouse, keyboard, speakers, monitor, etc. into separate ports on a computer. Now, I have a dock that all my peripherals connect to, and my laptop is just connected to that dock through a single USB-C cable. There’s never any noticeable lag, either. What improvements have been made so that this is now possible?
In: Technology
Original USB had 1 set of data pins and data was sent relatively slowly, although electricity itself moves fast the length of each pulse of data was quite long which limits how much can be sent in an amount of time. So it would be the equivalent of a dirt road with a speed limit of 10.
Over time the USB standard shortened the pulse of each signal which means more signals per second, which means faster speeds. So still a normal road with 1 lane in each direction but each version had a higher speed limit.
USB C added more data pins and further shortened the pulses, so now it’s like an interstate highway with 3 lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 100.
There were quite a few improvements, mostly having to deal with the ability with a chip to move that amount of data and still be cheap. However another issue was that in the past there was simply no need to move that much data on 1 cable. The original USB was a huge leap in not having to deal with a dozen different connectors, and nothing was moving much data. Today with storage being so fast there is a market to make USB faster to keep up.
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