Universal Serial Bus inventor Ajay Bhatt specifically chose not to make the original USB design reversible because adding the extra wiring would have doubled the cost of manufacturing and potentially killed the project.

A closer look

Universal Serial Bus inventor Ajay Bhatt specifically chose not to make the original USB design reversible because adding the extra wiring would have doubled the cost of manufacturing and potentially killed the project. By forcing users to plug it in one specific way, Bhatt saved the tech industry millions of dollars in production costs while simultaneously cursing humanity to decades of localized frustration. This brilliant cost-cutting measure resulted in the universal phenomenon where you try to plug a cable in, fail, flip it over, fail again, and then flip it back to the original orientation only for it to magically slide into place. We essentially sacrificed our collective sanity and millions of cumulative hours of human productivity just to save a few pennies on copper wiring in the late nineties, proving once again that corporate budget constraints are the true root cause of all minor inconveniences in our miserable, technology-dependent daily lives