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
> What kept us from having this, 10, 20 years ago?
There were ways to transfer crazy amounts of data back and forth 20 years ago – for supercomputers and internet infrastructure for example. Display cables as well supported a high bitrate: The highest resolution screens that were common in the 90s had a resolution of 1600×1200, running at 60 Hz. In terms of data, that is nearly 3 Gbit/s! That is still a bit shy of USB-C, but it’s much more than USB could handle back then.
However, this came at a price: The hardware you needed to run a computer screen at such a resolution was expensive, and it needed a lot of power. There was just no way to integrate that into a small mobile device. On top of that, there were no devices that could handle speeds like that – no lightning fast flash memory like we’re used today, the fastest thing you could possibly connect to USB were harddisks transmitting data in megabits per second, not gigabits.
However, there was actually a standard that could run much faster than USB back then: [Firewire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394) could reach speeds as high as 400 Mbit/s. This was used for stuff like external hard drives, which were often faster than what USB could handle.
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