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Comment by nousermane | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really curious to understand the origin of this "USB required 3 tries to plug in" thing.

It seem this is something everybody agrees with nowadays, but was it always like that? After all, USB-A plug has a prominent logo (distinguishable both on sight and by touch) that identifies up-side. It should be dead-simple to do, no? What went wrong?

- Did some laptop manufacturer mount USB-A receptacle upside-down?

- Or was that micro-B that trigger this? (for example Samsung/Nexus S and LG/Nexus 4/5 have micro-B receptacle upside-down relative to one another)

- General feeling of inferiority from Apple's Lightning plug?

- Something else altogether?

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Half of the time logo is missing from cable or flash drive (especially designer drives). Another problem is not everyone is using laptops even today, and that meme is originating from the times when laptops were much more rare and less usable. In the PC you just don't see whatever happens in the back when you are plugging in cables, especially since most of the time ports are vertical.

And the meme itself comes probably from the fact that USB-A port needs rather precise positioning to connect. Even if you are inserting connector the right way from the start, you will most likely hit metal part of the connector against metal parts of the port at first try and it will cause you to doubt yourself. You then turn it (incorrectly) and fail again, turn again (correct now) and try connecting more slowly and precisely and only then it fits :)

I think the second one is really the answer. Cheap laptops of the day had a lot of tolerance for the housing that lead into the port so if your weekend misangled you'd fit it pass the chassis but hit the edges of the PCB recepticle. I think new decides tend to have a rounded lip or some mating feature between the chassis and the PCB mounted recepticle so it's less of an issue. Higher end models often only have the tongue as part of the PCB leaving the outer bit to the chassis.

What voice recognition software are you using?

The absolute worst was a Dell laptop I had around 2008 with a combination USB-A/eSATA port. If you tried to plug a USB connector in upside down, you were basically connecting the USB pins of the device to the SATA part of the port and the computer would inexplicably reboot.

> Half of the time logo is missing from cable or flash drive

The other half of the time the logo is faintly embossed in black on a black substrate that your ambient lighting is just dim enough to render not visible.

Some manufacturers indeed mounted the port upside down (not typically on laptops, but on other devices). When the port is vertical or even in a horizontal surface, people can have trouble working out which side is meant to be up. Some manufacturers (Logitech was one) made their cables with an embossed logo of their own on the side opposite the USB logo, sometimes even without the USB logo. Pretty much nobody knew about the logo thing.

Even without all that, the feeling of being slightly misaligned with the port and the feeling of trying to plug it in upside down are hard to distinguish, with many port mountings, so people assume they've got it wrong and switch orientation.

USB-A requires some force to be plugged, and most users are "gentle" when plugging (not using too much force). So what happens is, the user tries it first in the correct orientation, but it doesn't enter (because the user was too gentle). The user flips to the wrong orientation, and uses a bit more force (but it won't enter because it's upside down). The user then flips back to the first orientation, and uses even more force; this time, the force is enough, and the plug enters the socket.

Personally I never noticed that there is a logo, and that logo means up.

And I’ve plugged in a lot of USB cables in my time, and even read parts of the USB spec in order to implement USB. Maybe I’m just a moron though.

I have ~2 devices with upside down usb ports, I usually look for the holes in the connector instead of the logo to see which side is up.

The major feature of usb-c isn't that it's bi-directional as in "you don't have to try 3 times", it's bi-directional as in "it's both an host and perpipheral port" but somehow everyone seems to forget that. That's why it's a C connector, it's both A and B

I never realized that the logo means "up". I think that is far from well-known information.

Anecdata: My mouse is connected to my PC in the front, so I just reached to check the logo and I'm feeling a logo on both sides of the connector. So I unplug it to check and it has the USB logo on the top and the Genius logo on the bottom. C'est génial! <facepalm>

Wow. Indeed. Just dug up a wired mouse out of a junk box, and sure enough - Genius logo embossed on the lower side of the connector.

Many of the slots are vertical, i.e on desktops, so it’s a nearly pointless fact anyway.

I think it's because USB flashdrives don't have the logo, or might have a company logo on the "wrong" side. In some cases the USB receptable would also be mounted vertically

Lots of vertical USB ports (sides of monitors, motherboards on desktops).

Lots of ports facing up or facing down (on the bottom side of a monitor).

Lots of cables have logos on both sides (JBL is an example at hand).

Lots of cables have NO logo (Fitbit).

- That USB connector in some dark recess of your car.

The ergonomics of reaching it from the driver seat while fully seated in that seat must be an interesting study.

I owned one car long enough to be able to get the connection on the first try multiple times.

On the USB-A plug you can see inside, so if there's no logo you can go by the plastic tab inside the connector, usually white or blue plastic. The tabs have to be on complementary sides.

It happens every single time you plug something into a USB A port, I’m surprised you haven’t witnessed it. They are very often upside down, sideways, and the mechanic design gives you no feeling/feedback that it’s going in the right way, it feels the same until it connects fully.

When USB 1.0 was first introduced, all connectors it replaced had to be plugged in the right way up, so non-reversibility wasn't seen as a problem at all.

USB 1.0 needed to be cheap and simple to be adopted. Wrapping a bit of metal around a PCB was cheap and simple.

You seem to be forgetting about desktop PCs, where USB ports are vertical, not horizontal. The logo is useless there.

"logo to the left"!

It was then as it is now- A connectors are four dimensional. The only difference is that back then you knew you had it right on the third attempt because your PC would reset.

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