Comment by krger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krger | Hacker News Reader

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>USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.

Yes. USB ports certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac's release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were, however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and look for the mass-market USB peripherals available for sale and let me know what you find.

Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in years afterwards, it was actually rather difficult to find USB peripherals that were not made out of translucent plastic to match iMacs.

Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.

USB ports not only existed, but were standard in new PCs. A quick search shows peripherals and monitors with USB hubs in PC World May-1998 (4/5 months before iMac launch). From that months number (Pages 172-184):

"UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth . Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18 of these new products"

Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks, cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.

>Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.

Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95 OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the PC.

https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/

Edited to add link and page reference.

You can attempt to rewrite history all you like but as someone who lived it there was a clear shift in the market pre-iMac and post-iMac. Less than a year after the iMac shipped there was at least an order of magnitude more USB devices than had been available previously. Every manufacturer jumped on the bandwagon. Funny enough you can't even question it - a ton of those devices used iMac-like translucency, color, or both.

I was a diehard PC user way back then but even I wasn't shameless enough to claim the iMac had nothing to do with pushing USB forward.

The change to USB was on the move already much before the iMac launches. Just check magazines since the end of 97, there are reviews of products before the launch. The iMac rode the wave with the rest. Sure a few USB peripherals would have been made translucent, so what?

I'm not saying the iMac was the sole driver of USB adoption nor even the majority of it... but it definitely had an impact far larger than the Mac's tiny marketshare at the time would otherwise indicate. A big enough impact to help drive USB adoption overall.

So many peripherals were still PS/2 (for mice), parallel (eg Zip/Tape drives), or serial (soooooo many things especially bespoke, industrial, or specialized equipment).

Think about it: do all PCs have USB ports? Definitely not. Do all PCs have a serial port? 99% yes. You're a manufacturer making a non-top-100 product. Do you use the new-fangled USB or do you use a serial FIFO? Obviously you use serial. That maximizes your audience.

But the iMac changed the thinking: This new iMac thing is hot. Seems like Apple is on the rise again. If I want to sell to these customers (who are more affluent and known to buy more software/accessories) I don't have a choice: it must be USB. I know the majority of the PC install base doesn't have USB yet but most new PCs do so I can still reach a lot of the PC audience. So the next version of my product uses USB (or a USB-FIFO bridge). As more of the market switched to USB even existing PC users installed USB expansion cards.

Would USB have eventually gotten there? Yes. Would it have done so as quickly? I don't think so. The wide-open nature of the PC has always been both its boon and bane. See the many attempts to supplant x86 in the PC world, the several attempts to replace or expand ISA before PCI, etc.

Usb ports existed on a few high end PCs but before 1999 or so they were super uncommon and nobody used them.

You didn't bother to check an easy source. Another one: USB support was standard in chipsets for Intel and AMD chips. Aug97 link:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/72

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