Ajay Bhatt’s Cable Chaos: How USB Became the World’s Universal Connector

The desk was a familiar battlefield. A tangle of cables coiled around the back of a beige desktop computer. Thick printer plugs. Awkward serial connectors. Bulky parallel ports. Each one shaped differently. Each one demanding its own slot. Each one capable of being ed the wrong way. Ajay Bhatt stared at the mess and felt what many engineers quietly feel: This shouldn’t be this hard. That irritation — small, practical, unglamorous — became the starting point for one of the most important connector standards ever created. A World Drowning in Ports In the mid-1990s, personal computers were becoming mainstream. But connecting anything to them was painful. Keyboards used one connector. Mice used another. Printers another. Scanners another. Digital cameras were…