If you grew up around early PCs, you’ll remember the back of the machine looking like a metal porcupine. Serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports, modem ports, game ports… half the time you weren’t sure whether you were plugging in a mouse or summoning an ancient demon.
And then one day, they disappeared — replaced by one humble little rectangle that promised simplicity but still managed to mess with us for twenty years.
So let’s take a walk down tech memory lane and unpack what actually happened to those old ports, why USB took over the world, and how USB-C finally delivered the sanity we were begging for.
The Age of Serial and Parallel Ports
Back in the 80s and 90s, serial and parallel ports ruled the roost. They were the kings of PC connectivity.
Serial ports handled mice and modems, and anything else that crawled along at a snail’s pace. Parallel ports took on printers, scanners and giant contraptions that made your computer desk look like a NASA mission control panel.
But these ports were:
- painfully slow
- clunky
- fiddly
- held in by screws that required wrist strength you didn’t know you needed
- absolutely not hot-swappable
And if you unplugged anything while the computer was on, you risked the kind of system crash that made grown adults question their life choices.
In short, those ports were a product of their time; brilliant then, prehistoric now.
Then Along Came USB… the Great Simplifier
In 1996, USB arrived and promised to save us:
- one universal port
- no more IRQ conflicts
- actual plug-and-play
- hot-swapping
- a single cable type for almost everything
It was a miracle.
Printers moved to USB. Keyboards and mice moved to USB. Cameras, scanners, storage devices — everything slowly migrated toward this new “universal” standard.
But as good as USB was, it came with one massive design flaw that haunted humanity for two decades.
USB-A: The Port That Was Always Wrong the First Two Times
USB-A was brilliant on paper, but someone overlooked a tiny little detail: orientation.
The plug only went in one way, but you always guessed wrong.
Always.
Every human on Earth experienced the same ritual:
- Try to plug it in. Doesn’t fit.
- Flip it over. Still doesn’t fit.
- Flip it back. Magically fits.
It became a running joke:
USB has three positions: wrong, wrong, and finally right.
It didn’t matter how tech-savvy you were. The plug was cursed.
But while we were all fumbling behind our PCs like it was an escape room challenge, something else was happening…
The Quiet Death of Serial and Parallel Ports
Once USB became mainstream, the old connectors didn’t stand a chance:
- printers abandoned parallel ports
- PS/2 keyboards faded away
- serial ports became niche industrial leftovers
- laptops needed fewer and smaller connectors
- manufacturers loved saving space and money
By the mid-2000s, serial and parallel ports were basically fossils. You still see them in industrial environments, but in everyday computing, they’re gone.
USB won. Plain and simple.
USB-C: The Redemption Humanity Deserved
Eventually the gods of engineering took pity on us.
USB-C arrived, and it was everything USB-A should have been:
- reversible
- tiny
- powerful
- blisteringly fast
- capable of delivering enough power to charge laptops
- able to handle video, data, audio, networking… everything
Best of all:
you never have to rotate it like a frustrated caveman.
Just plug it in. It works. Every time.
It’s elegant, simple, future-proof, and honestly, it feels like the first time the industry collectively said, “Let’s stop annoying people.”
Where We Are Today
Serial and parallel ports had their era. They helped build the foundation of the digital world. But time moved on.
USB took over because it made life easier. USB-C perfected it because it finally made the cable behave like a human-friendly object.
Looking back, it’s actually hilarious how much of our computing history involved wrestling with metal connectors, bent pins, and orientation struggles. But now, with USB-C, we finally have the universal port the world always needed.
And thank goodness for that!