USB - The Mother Of All Connectors

USB -  The Mother Of All Connectors :

USB - the mother of all connectors is now 20 years old. Its Indian born inventor, Ajay Bhatt is already working to refine its new smaller, speedier avatar : the type "C".

The USB or Universal Serial Bus is arguably the most commonly used connection technology today.. There are an estimated  10 billion USB powered devices out there. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a world without this mother of all connectors. But till the mid 1900s, the desktop Personal Computer and its smaller brother, the Laptop, were a mess  of different sized ports - a serial port, a printer port, a port of mouse and key-board, one for the modem ( before the days of WiFi routers ).another for the Internet data cable, yet another for the audio connection to speakers or microphone.

Salvation came in 1995 when the US based computer chip leader Intel released the design of a new Universal Connector that could replace all these connectors.It was the USB. And the leader of the team at Intel, that develop the connector, the man who earned 8 patents for the design, was a Indian Ajay Bhatt an electronics engineering graduate of Maharaja Sayajirao Univesity, Baroda (now Vadodara), and an MS from City University , New York, who had joined Intel in 1990 as a chip architect.

How USB happened :

For the man who was mainly responsible for the invention of the Universal Serial Bus, the stimulus came from his wife and child. In dire need of print out of their daughter's school project, his wife used to ring up chief Architect Ajay Bhutt in his lab at Intel's Oregon (US) plant, asking for help to connect the PC and printer properly. It was not easy with different printers needing  different ports. Mr. Bhutt wondered why not create a single solution to replace serial, parallel  and printer ports  on a PC? In November 1995, his work which won him 8 patents, resulted in the USB 1.0 standard for connectors. Intel and Bhutt jointly decided to make the standard available free of all licencing and royalty fees. That was one reason why the USB  became the defacto standard for PC connection.

Bhutt has remained with Intel ever since. Currently Intel Fellow Chief Client Platform Architect for the PC Client Group, Bhutt wanted to be an Architect literally and even attended classes in the Arts Department of Baroda University, before deciding it was not for  him and switches to engineering.

Today, he is deeply involved in refining the standards for Type 'C'. Beyond the USB 

his core work at Intel is on future client computing platforms. Bhutt feels the day is not far, when PCs boot up and  shut down in two seconds, as as if operated by a light switch. And soon they will be powered wirelessly. He had dramatically simplified wired connection. But he will not be surprised, if eventually, most of what the USB does will be done wirelessly, rendering obsolete the universal wire connector he invented ! Science never stops!