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fzzzy·

That usb a to usb a cable is beyond cursed.

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Okay. That's pretty funny!

I didn't even notice, I just picked the first 2.5" enclosure Amazon showed me.

Before I understood the host/client nature of USB, I was convinced this magic non-existent USB-to-USB cable would let me connect any PC to any PC and copy between them like giant flash drives.

Mac’s _almost_ have a giant flash drives mode with target disk mode but via USB-C.

I've seen infomercial-tier products laid out like that back in the XP era. They use bespoke software, and probably some sort of IP over USB to work, but I've never needed to buy one.

Looking it up just now indicates that such products still exist. https://plugable.com/products/usb3-tran

The usb-c version of the same is even more confusing, either it's a normal type-c cable and the software is all you get, or it's a cursed bespoke type-c cable that will haunt you for years.

If only USB was peer to peer like FireWire. Then again, there'd probably be some trade-off to that.

USB 4, being thunderbolt, actually allows this I think

Thunderbolt is capable of doing this, but USB has had support for peer to peer and alternative client support for quite a while. USB OTG (On-The-Go), which allows a USB client device to also act as a host, has been around since the 2.0 spec. This is what lets USB devices like phones and tablets also connect to card readers, keyboards, and other USB devices.

What Thunderbolt can do however that is quite magical, is operate as a point to point network interface. Driver support can be a bit dodgy, but it's totally feasible to build a 3 node compute cluster with point to point cluster node networking over Thunderbolt at 20 Gb/s.

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