What’s so complex about USB-C that we couldn’t have had this technology 20 years ago?
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Realistically it could’ve existed for some applications 20 years ago (making something like it wouldn’t have been impossible from an engineering or material science standpoint) but it would’ve cost a bit more because USB-C requires devices connected with it to be capable of understanding a reversible or negatively signaled cable.
Not really a huge need for it at the time.
20 years ago, the industry hadn’t get even remotely agreed to the idea of a universal mobile device power connector. Digital video still wasn’t a common trend, and high speed peripheral data connections weren’t common for everyday consumer use.
Prior to USB we had serial and parallel devices
You’d wire up the devices, manually install drivers, and had to configure settings like IRQ and Serial Port IDs manually.
USB doing all of those things automatically and providing power has a huge leap forward.
The fact that the connector wasn’t reversible wasn’t even a consideration, it was already so much better than what we had that no one cared.
It wasn’t until the invention of cellphones and USB became so common place for charging that people started to care about that.
If they had thought about it in the 90s they probably would have made it reversible back then.
If you mean having a plug shape that was reversible, we could have, but keep in mind that back then, before laptops and smartphones etc became widely used you weren’t plugging and unplugging devices constantly. You plugged your keyboard and mouse into your computer and it just stayed that way. The rise of portable devices is really what has lead to the change for plug shape.
If you’re talking about the capabilities, such as carrying video and other signals over the same cable, it’s a combination of things.
First is increasing data speeds to handle large amounts over one cable without that cable becoming excessively large requires improvements in materials science making it possible to carry finely differentiated signals that change values rapidly over time without interfering with each other isn’t easy.
Second, every kind of device that wants to talk over the cable has to know how. This involves a combination of circuitry and software. The more different types of signals the more complex it is. That’s why in the past having different cables for different purposes (video separate from key board) made sense. But software has improved and you can do more with a small chip now than you could with an entire computer 20 years ago.
All these things together make handling communication over one cable practical when it didn’t used to be.
Literally it was cost savings. I can’t be bothered to look it up but the inventor of the prior USB format said it was due to not wanting to pay for operability
In addition to the reversibility of USB-C, USB-C itself can mean different things (sorta). Some can only handle power, some power and data, some can’t handle sufficient data, some can be longer, some can only be shorter, some have specific protocols for a particular device, etc. It’s why if you take a USB-C that comes with a phone (factory cable) sometimes it can’t charge a different phone (even if you use that phone’s charger).
USB-C is just the connector shape, which is reversible unlike all those other USB variants (A, B, mini, micro). But the biggest improvements to USB have been the transition from USB 2.0 to 3.0 (and now up to 3.2). It can transfer a metric FUCKTON of data (like two monitors worth of data) while rapidly charging your device at up to 100W. It’s so impressive compared to where we used to be with computers.
Usb c is just the physical connector so the answer to that is simply it wasn’t needed then about the protocol itself there’s a lot of work to do about compatibility and signal stability
Ignoring the extra data speed of USB-C that allows things like displays and graphics cards to be plugged in (obviously just general improvement to chip speeds allowed this), we didn’t get a reversible connector 20 years ago because it would have slightly increased cost and they were going for the absolute minimum possible cost for connectors and cables so that manufacturers of budget PCs and budget consumer devices (who are very sensitive to manufacturing cost) would adopt it (which is actually a hard thing to do for some completely new standard, see that XKCD comic on standards).
Also at the time the idea of a portable storage drives didn’t really exist, for portable storage you would have some kind of drive (eg. a Zip drive) that would be permanently plugged in to your computer and came with removable cartridges that you would take with you. So there wasn’t the need to constantly plug and unplug USB devices like there is now.
Price.
They actually had this planned for previous versions but it was too expensive.
Usb always was a very cheap way to do things.
So why does it cost more?
If you plug in something the other way too you have to rewire everything by an additional switch and that simply adds to cost. Not a lot but usb always was the cheapest mass market connection.
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