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What they found was a ship over 98 feet long and 23 feet widelikely a 16th century merchant vessel with a load of ceramics on board. The color images show at least 200 earthenware pitchers now trapped under sediment. The globular pitcherswith pinched spouts and ribbon handlesinclude the monogram "IHS" (a Greek symbol representing Jesus Christ) and geographic pattern that may be inspired by plant life.

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Napoleon had planned an invasion of the UK but it was never carried out. Preparations were financed by the sale of the Louisiana territory to the US which the US financed with a loan from a British bank, so Britain was indirectly funding an invasion of itself. pic.twitter.com/DjzNcW3ZYi

— Today I Learned (@TILhub) April 3, 2026

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The story behind the rise of USB-A is wild.

In 1990, an Intel engineer named Ajay Bhatt couldn't get his wife's printer to work for their daughter's school project. A printer. In his own house. He was a senior architect at the world's biggest chip company, and he couldn't make a printer talk to a PC without rebooting three times and opening the case.

He pitched the idea of a universal connector to his managers. They didn't just pass. They told him nobody would want it.

Bhatt switched teams, found a manager who said yes, and spent the next four years convincing Compaq, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel to sit in the same room and agree on a single plug. Seven companies that competed on everything else agreed to share one connector. The USB 1.0 standard shipped in January 1996. Almost nobody used it. Windows 95 barely supported it. USB was basically dead on arrival.

Then Steve Jobs did something nobody expected. He shipped the 1998 iMac as USB-only. No serial port, no parallel port, no floppy drive. Just USB. Apple, the company that fought standards harder than anyone, single-handedly forced an entire industry onto Bhatt's connector.

Intel owned the patents. They made the entire thing royalty-free. Any manufacturer on earth could build a USB-A port for pennies. By 2009, 6 billion USB products were in the market, with 2 billion more shipping every year.

Making the connector reversible would have doubled the cost, so Bhatt kept it one-sided to keep adoption cheap. "In hindsight, we blew it," he said years later. The most cursed design decision in consumer electronics, and it was a deliberate trade.

USB-A killed serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 connectors, game ports, and eventually the floppy disk. One rectangle replaced an entire generation of cables. The connector is 30 years old and as of 2024, Type-A still accounted for 46% of all USB device shipments. Billions of ports in airplane seatbacks, hotel nightstands, hospital beds, and office walls.

The EU mandated USB-C on all new devices in December 2024. The installed base of USB-A will take 20 years to turn over. One guy's printer problem became the most successful connector standard in computing history. And now the rest of us carry a bag of dongles everywhere we go because of it.

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The story behind the rise of USB-A is wild.

In 1990, an Intel engineer named Ajay Bhatt couldn't get his wife's printer to work for their daughter's school project. A printer. In his own house. He was a senior architect at the world's biggest chip company, and he couldn't make a… https://t.co/jkTYsVYbbt

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) April 6, 2026