USB-C has insane transfer rates, enough to power multiple screens, you can even use it to charge devices at the same time and the ports have a size that is already dangerously small. Genius!
What kept us from having this, 10, 20 years ago?
In: Technology
We could easily have had the cables and the connectors.
We could not have built the sort of gadgets that would be able to make use of that.
Stuff like the ability to plug in the port upside down and have it work would easily have been doable 20 years ago.
The more power aspect that allows you to power and charge devices at up to 100 Watt is a bit trickier but in general something we could have made work decades ago too.
The transfer speed of up to 10Gbit/s is another thing entirely.
10Gbit/s transfer speeds are not new. 10Gig Ethernet has been around for a while by now at this point and stuff like Infiniband from Mellanox has been available for about two decades now. It was just very, very expensive back when it first came out. (It is still expensive today, too)
So, in theory it would have been possible to built something like USB-C in the year 2000, but it would have been very bulky and extremely expensive and it would not have caught on as people wouldn’t want to for example add a port to their smartphone that trippeled its weight and increased the price by factor of ten or a hundred.
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