USB Standard Celebrates Its 20th Birthday

USB is something that we’re quite fond of these days because it enables easy connectivity across many of our devices. This connectivity standard has recently celebrated its 20th birthday on November 15, 2016, and its creator, Ajay Bhatt, has told the world everything there is to know about it. It looks like Bhatt actually earned his place on Intel’s chipset architecture team in 1990, when he took up a position as a senior staff architect. During those times, peripherals such as mice and keyboards were connected to PCs using serial and parallel ports that didn’t offer much in the way of speed, not to mention the fact that accessories had to rely on expansion cards and custom drivers in order to function properly.

It was Ajay who suggested the creation of a Universal Serial Bus in order to solve all of these problems, and the first USB 1.0 Release Candidate was released in 1995. Afraid of compatibility issues, many companies decided not to adopt the standard at first, but as Intel implemented it without giving it a second thought, USB soon became the most popular choice for most manufacturers. It’s also worth noting that Intel decided to make USB free from royalties or licensing fees, which means that Bhatt did not earn any money for his work. Still, I’m not too worried about his financial state, as he is now the chief systems technologist over at Intel, which means that he’s probably rewarded quite nicely for his work.