USB

USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, is an industry standard for digital data transmission and power delivery between computers and other electronic devices, specifying the physical connectors and communication protocols used to link a host such as a personal computer to peripherals such as keyboards, storage devices and printers. A consortium of companies including Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel designed the standard, completed in January 1996, to replace the tangle of earlier interfaces such as serial ports, parallel ports, game ports and the Apple Desktop Bus with one common connector. USB became commonplace on personal computers through the late 1990s and 2000s and has since expanded to phones, game consoles, power supplies and countless other small electronics, effectively superseding nearly every earlier general-purpose port.