What’s so complex about USB-C that we couldn’t have had this technology 20 years ago?
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We had this technology 45 years ago. We had it at slower speeds. We have also have better buses than USB and still USB prevails. IMHO FireWire was better than USB.
Here’s the USB of the 80s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_SIO
The design requirements.
The products we use are generally brought about by the requirements we have, USB was a reflection of that. It simplified so many things, and that was enough.
Once people got used to that, they began refining the idea to make it smaller and, eventually, reversible.
The point here is that our requirements for the connector changed over time. Initially all we wanted was something simpler than what we had, and once we had that, it was a matter of refining the details.
Perhaps you are under the misapprehension that USB-C is a particularly new technology. It was invented almost a decade ago. The first USB-C phones came out 8 years ago and the first USB-C laptops 7 years ago.
Price to manufacture, demand, consortium to get everyone one the same page, etc. There are devices currently available that are capable of delivering speeds that are exponentially larger than USB-C, and power delivery that is unmatched. Do we need them in our current devices? No. Will we need them in 20 years or so, probably. So USB-C tech actually has been available for probably more than 20 years, it was just never needed, and it wasn’t cost effective to implement. Everything has to match up, for example can we have a cable that delivers astounding power, crazy transfer rates, we could. But can our batteries handle that power, do you need to transfer things via cable at those rates? So some experimental tech is there currently, but it’s waiting on other components to catch up before it would be feasible, financially, to integrate it into the device.
Usb-C as a communications and power cable?
No technical limit in materials science I am aware of that prevents it.
But, 20 years ago there was no application that needed the power and data speeds of USB-C. I’d need to do some maths to check but it might be that you’d exceed the computational power of a 2000s PC trying to read in USB-C data at max bandwidth. It would have been an expensive cable of no real world use.
Communications standards like usb evolve alongside the users of that communication for reasons of economics more often that those of fundamental science.
The signaling rate of data on modern USB-C cables is crazy high. Cables today can carry power, 5K video and high speed data at rates faster than computers ran 20 years ago. The controller chips for modern USB are VERY complex and couldn’t have been manufactured at a price / size that would have made sense in consumer products 20 years ago. Electronics really have gotten smaller / faster / cheaper over time.
Compare the function and complexity of the motherboard inside an original Apple ][ or TRS-80 with the main board in your Phone. Amazing progress. Modern SOC (System on a Chip) designs are tens of thousands of times more complex than the processors in the original IBM PC.
Modern USB-C is equally far removed from computer interfaces of 20 yrs ago.
USB-C is almost 10 years old as it is. Before this we had the original connectors USB-A and USB-B.
There’s nothing overly complex about USB-C, it’s just that when the original connectors were being developed in the 1990s they weren’t expecting items to unplug devices as often, so they weren’t made reversible.
It’s like asking why kids can’t rap. The computers in the earlier stages didn’t know how to communicate like that, and therefore there wasn’t any cable to relay that speed of communication.
The first seven pages of the [USB Type C Specification](https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type-C%20Spec%20R2.0%20-%20August%202019.pdf) list the names of the people and organisations who came together to work on USB-C.
This took a shite load of work, plus decades of computer science to get to the point the conversation was worth to having.
Standardisation is really, really hard. There are always compromises. People and organisations get passionate about things.
The hardware and software is one thing. Manufacturing had to reach a certain capability before USB-C could be realised. But really the political work, discussion, consideration and agreement all take time.
If you want your spec to be adopted, especially for something you want to be as ubiquitous as USB-C, there is no avoiding this process.
USB C is an evolution based on changing needs, higher bandwidth, master / client symmetry, more power … USB A only offers 2.5W (iirc) standard. We learn.
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