I mean the 3.5mm audio jack was designed in the 50s...
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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It was actually the 70s but pretty close
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)#Historical_development
That's of course the 1870s I mean
That is the original phone plug, not the 3.5mm mini plug, I checked the wiki while I made my comment (:
I feel like it still counts given it's the exact same plug just a slightly different size
S/PDIF-TOSLINK is from the early 80s. Ethernet just a bit newer, from the mid-80s.
And we probably don't want to start nitpicking about that antenna connector there.
Oh, and HDMI is from 2002, so about the same time.
Turns out that one USB-C is the only thing that isn't a full on ancient connector. I/O has good reasons to move slowly and stay backwards compatible.
Huh, i had no idea that toslink was from the early 80s, interesting!
I was in school when USB was released and remember the first reviews of a USB stick came out...
Same!
When they started showing the standard, tech magazines covered it like they had just invented flying cars.
"So get this, your joystick and your mouse will go... in the same plug! Theoretically every single device could be plugged into the same hole with the same number of pins!"
My second favorite instance of breathless tech coverage, next to the guy who first tested an optical mouse and reported on its ability to work on different surfaces by very heavily implying the sentence "you could use this thing on your dick!"
I don't think people these days remember that mouse mats weren't some hardcore gamer optimization thing, ball mice wouldn't really work without one.
Sorry, old man tangent.
Oh, remember Lohitech's weird experment with rumble / force feedback mice?
I think it was the Logitech iForceMan or iFeel or something...
The idea was that you would feel when the cursor was over a button or link, weird...
I do not, but that sounds like something Apple is due to invent for the first time any day.
I did have a mouse that had a touch surface instead of a mouse wheel but still felt exactly like a mousehweel using haptics. It was creepy, cool and kinda worked. That was Microsoft, though.
The Apple Magic Mouse is touch based too for buttons and gestures, but I malice the Magic track pad may have had a haptic actuator in it of simulating click and Force Touch (harder clicks). The track pads I on MacBooks have done this for over a decade and it works really well.
I'm using toslink to connect my 2022 TV to my 25+ year old stereo. Toslink is great.
Yeah, ironically the fancy optical connection/cable is outdated
At least they no longer put PS/2 ports in there. But it was not too long ago
All PCs use electricity, wanna guess how old that is? /s
But seriously, I think there's several much older standards still in use on modern PCs, like ATX, the PCI bus, 8250/16550 UART, the x86 instruction set, BIOS etc.
Yeah but is it their birthdays today?
I think Ethernet is even older.
Ethernet was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE 802.3.
But, the history is a little murky, because older Ethernet was VERY different than it is today and that variety, much like the older USB 1.0, is not at all common in modern machines.
The really really old piece of hardware in every modern powerful gaming PC is the power supply. Surely the form factor and demands made on power supplies have changed incrementally over the years. But the technology that goes into power supplies wasn't exactly new even before Ethernet or USB.
If you're talking about just switch mode power supplies then I don't think that really counts. It's like saying "the capacitor" is older or something. Also they have improved in efficiency and max power over the years and now we have GaN power supplies.
Twisted pair ethernet which is very similar to today's ethernet is still very old.
~~8mm~~ 3.5mm audio jack: “Am I a joke to you?”
8mm? That's larger than a guitar plug. What kind of PC do you have?
After having to fiddle with 3.5mm connectors enough times, I have started seeing the appeal of XLR.
Not that it matters, because nothing in my budget has an XLR on it and I always have to fiddle with the connector every time I put on my headphones, to make sure R and L are getting a proper connection.
Sometimes, even turning it in place does the trick and I fail to understand how.
Almost every smartphone usb port is 2.0 as well. USB C is just a connector folks.
I thought USB c ports were generally 3.0?
So the USB connector and the USB protocol are different, and not necessarily related to each other - however there is a functional upper limit to the throughput that a given connector type can support (you'll never get USB 3.0 data transfer through a USB Mini connector).
A type C connector might only be wired to USB 2.0-level hardware on the back - but this is not really a bad thing. There are lots of low-level electronic devices that need a USB connector that don't really need 3.0 data transfer, and faster data processing chips are more expensive, but it's convenient to only need one type of cable for everything.
There are some nice reference tables in the Wikipedia article: USB Hardware
There are lots of low-level electronic devices that need a USB connector that don't really need 3.0 data transfer,
When apple made the switch to USB C there was a lot of controversy over the charging speed & data transfer they allow per model.
I don’t know what year it was but essentially the non-PRO versions of their phones/tablets were limited to slower overall speeds.
Usb C has pins for both 3.x/4 and separate ones for usb 2.0. Many devices just hook up the 2.0 lines and call it a day, because parts that can actually handle 3.0+ are rare and expensive.
Companies making USB capable parts typically contract out or buy the section of their chip which handles USB or other things like ethernet (Intellectual property cores or IP core) already designed as a drop in part of the semiconductor.. This usually is under some form of contract / nda + they pay a big fee, so the parts are expensive and documentation can be tough to acquire without yourself signing NDA and being a company looking to use their ICs.
USB 2.0 is much simpler and cheaper to deal with and cant handle as much bandwidth, but thats typically acceptable for simple electronics.
on a pc, yes, they are generally are some sort of usb 3 (like 3.2 gen 1 or gen 2).
as a connector, though, usb type-c is used for more than just usb.
Maybe a few years ago but they're pretty much all USB 3 now.