If you have ever plugged a keyboard, a flash drive, or an ESP32 dev board into a computer without thinking twice, you have Ajay Bhatt to thank. In 1996 a team led by the Intel engineer published the first Universal Serial Bus specification, and it quietly ended one of the most frustrating chapters in personal computing. The strangest part of the story is that Bhatt never made a cent from it.
The mess USB was built to end
To appreciate USB, you have to remember the tangle it replaced. Before 1996, connecting a device to a PC meant matching it to the right port from a confusing lineup: a serial port for the mouse, a parallel port for the printer, a PS/2 connector for the keyboard, and a fistful of expansion cards and jumper settings for anything more exotic. Each interface had its own cable, its own speed, and its own quirks. Adding hardware often meant opening the case, flipping DIP switches, and rebooting, hoping the machine would recognize the new device.
Bhatt, then a systems architect at Intel, watched his own family struggle to connect a printer and decided the whole model was broken. His pitch was simple: one port, one connector, hot-swappable, that any device could use and any user could plug in without reading a manual. That idea became the Universal Serial Bus, developed by a consortium of seven companies including Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and IBM, with the 1.0 specification released in January 1996.
Why the inventor earned no royalties
Here is the detail that surprises people. Intel held patents related to USB, but the company made a deliberate choice to keep the standard royalty-free and open to any manufacturer. That decision is exactly why USB spread so fast: no licensing tollbooth stood between a hardware maker and a working port. Billions of USB connectors have shipped since, and Bhatt, now widely credited as the face of the invention, has said he never earned money from it directly. As he put it, he did not do it for the money but to bring about change.
It is a useful lesson about open standards. A proprietary, licensed connector might have earned Intel a short-term fee on every port. Instead, by giving USB away, the industry got a universal foundation that outlived dozens of competing interfaces. Openness scaled further than ownership ever could have.
From desktop convenience to the backbone of embedded work
USB was designed for keyboards and printers, but its plug-and-play DNA turned out to be perfect for hardware development. Today the fastest way to flash firmware onto a microcontroller is over USB. Boards like the ESP32, the Raspberry Pi Pico, and countless Arduino variants expose a USB port that handles power, programming, and serial debugging all at once. A student in Manila can prototype a connected sensor on a single cable that costs almost nothing, precisely because USB is universal and free to implement.
That accessibility matters enormously for the growing hardware scene in the Philippines. When the barrier to entry is a laptop and a five-dollar dev board, more engineering students and small teams can build real IoT prototypes, from flood sensors to agricultural monitors, without importing expensive proprietary programmers. The humble USB port is a quiet enabler of that whole ecosystem.
The takeaway
The story of USB is really a story about reducing friction. Bhatt looked at a pile of incompatible cables and asked why connecting a device could not be as simple as plugging it in. The answer reshaped computing and, decades later, still shapes how connected devices get built and deployed.
At Fluidwire we work in that same spirit, turning messy hardware and software problems into clean, reliable connected systems from silicon to cloud. If you are building an IoT product or a web platform to run it, get in touch and let us help you make the complicated feel like plugging in a cable.
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