Everybody welcome back to explain like on five. To talk about the questions you always want to ask, and talk about them in a way that's easy to understand. We are your hosts, I'm Tim. Everyone, I'm Kevin.
So Kevin, today we're talking about USB. It's a technology that most of us use almost every day. But how much do we really know about it? Well, to start off, USB, it stands for Universal Serial Bus.
But you'd actually have to go back quite a few years for you to recall anyone actually calling it by that name. That's right, USB has become an essential part of our lives, connecting our devices, allowing data transfer, and charging, of course. But let's start with this question. Is it still considered wrong to remove a USB device like a flash drive or something without first telling the software that you want to eject it?
Getting right to the very important questions I see. So the reason behind that ejection process is to ensure that all the data has been fully written to the USB device before you disconnect it. When you're transferring files and performing any operation on a USB device, what happens is the computer it caches the data in its memory before writing it to the device. Safely ejecting the USB allows the computer to complete this process and ensure that no data is lost or corrupted midway through.
So that's why you typically see this on a USB flash drive or a thumb drive, because that kind of gets moved in and out a lot. But why is there a need for that? Can you explain in the live five times? Sure, I could try.
You know when you're going on vacation and you're packing. But you still need to use some of the stuff you need to pack, so instead of putting it all into your suitcase, maybe you set some of it next to your suitcase or leave it out on a counter so you don't forget it. So that's why you can still use it without having to completely unpack it from your luggage, like your toothbrush or something. That's kind of how a USB drive works.
Sometimes you tell the computer to pack data onto the drive. And rather than put it all on their right away, it might end up caching some of it to be written later. And when you rip out the drive, you kind of risk pulling it out before all your data is, you know, packed correctly, properly onto the drive. And when you click safely remove, it does something like running around the house and finally packing all the stuff that you left out and meant to pack in there, as then, you know, as safely gets into your luggage and then you can safely disconnect it.
That's a great way to explain the eject function. Now let's go back in time a little bit. Who came up with the idea of USB in the first place? So USB was actually invented by a team of engineers led by Ajay Bhatt, who was an Indian born American computer architect who worked for Intel Corporation.
And he and his team came up with the concept of USB in the early 1990s. The goal was to create a standardized connection that could replace the various proprietary connectors used by all sorts of different devices at the time. So how did they evolve from there to become such a successful standard? So USB was first introduced in 1996 with a release of USB 1.0.
And it had a cute maximum data transfer rate of 12 megabits per second, which was, you know, quite a significant improvement over the serial and parallel ports of that era. And over the years, USB technology has gotten a lot better. The introduction of USB 2.0 in the year 2000 increased the data transfer rate all the way up to 480 megabits per second. And finally, we're at USB 3 right now, was released in 2008 and offered a data transfer rate of up to five gigabits per second or 5,000 megabits per second.
And all these miraculously essentially kept the same connector design throughout too. So those were the bigger connectors, right? The ones that only fit one way up. And now we're at USB C, which is a smaller symmetrical design.
Yeah, that's right. USB C is the latest USB standard and was introduced in 2014. It offers several advantages over previous standards. Firstly, it has that, you know, much of the word reversible connector, which means he could finally just plug it in either way, eliminate a frustration of trying to figure out, you know, he's an up or down.
And USB C also supports even faster data transfer rates of up to 10 gigabits per second. And it can also do other cool things like deliver more power, allowing for something really cool, called fast charging for devices. And finally, while we're on that charging comment, often you see these power banks in airports and things, but there's this term called juice jacking. What is it and how does it relate to USB?
Oh, yeah, this is pretty important to know these days. Juice jacking is a type of cyber attack, where hackers basically use these public USB charging ports to steal your data or install some type of virus or malware on your devices. And when you connect your device to a public charge station or even any unknown USB port, you know, you kind of run the risk of exposing your data to potential hackers. It's always important to be cautious and only use trusted charging sources or even invest in something called a USB data blocker, also commonly known as a USB condom online to protect your devices.
I see, thanks, Evan. Did you let something new? If you did, send us an email. We are at ELI5, the podcast at gmail.com.
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