USB inventor Ajay Bhatt did not make a dime from it - but here's the reasons...

Intel’s calling November 15, 1995, the 20th birthday of USB. But it’s not enough to have a birthday anymore; you need an origin story, too. And for USB, one of most popular technology standards of the PC era, that story is a humble one: printer problems at home. That’s what drove Intel Fellow Ajay Bhatt’s multi-year obsession to make the Universal Serial Bus a reality. 

The USB, short for Universal Serial Bus, turned 20 on Sunday and apparently, the man who invented it hasn’t made a single penny from it! Ajay Bhatt, Intel’s Chief Systems Technologist, who is said to be largely responsible for inventing the USB technology believes that he did it to bring about change.

“Anytime (my family) wanted to do something simple like print a letter for my daughter’s school, I would get a phone call from my wife that she just can’t print it,” Bhatt said. “She does something, but nothing happens to the printer.”



In an interview with PCWorld, Bhatt spoke at length about USB’s humble origins, the fight to make it a broad standard, and why, oh why, the original USB connector wasn’t reversible. We also look at where connectivity standards are going, as USB-C and its rival Thunderbolt ascend.

Viewed from today, when you can print from your laptop to a wirelessly networked printer in the den, it's hard to believe how primoridal 90’s-era technology was. Printers still connected via clunky and often cranky parallel ports. People still contended with serial, PS/2, ethernet, and SCSI cables as well.


Bhatt said his goal was to create a simple universal standard for low-cost, low-bandwidth devices.
In conversation with Business Insider, Bhatt stated, “I don’t do these things for money. I did this to bring about change, and it’s not very often that somebody gets a chance to bring about this big a change.”

The USB technology actually did not offer monetary profits to anyone. The report points out that Intel, who owns all patents to the technology as the first backer of Bhatt’s USB idea, decided to make it open and royalty free from the beginning. Ironically, when Bhatt had initially pitched the idea to tech companies, including Apple and Microsoft, it received a lukewarm response.


He believes that even though, he missed out on a chance to make millions of dollars, his contribution to the computer industry will make up for it. Bhatt adds, “If computers are seen to be easy, then we’ll sell more computers, and as part of that, we’ll sell more chips. It’s a much bigger picture that Intel saw,” Bhatt said. “As the pie gets bigger, we get a piece of the pie, and we’re happy with it.”