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ACCESS.bus: The Forgotten USB Competitor
A few years before USB took over the world of peripherals, another upstart standard aimed to do the same thing. And I’m not talking about FireWire.
Developed in the early 1980s by Philips Semiconductor, I²C may be one of the oldest things still in wide use in most modern computers beyond the x86 instruction set—and it is often key to adding driver support into operating systems. The downside of I²C’s simplicity is that it is a bad option for delivering lots of data—and during the heyday of ACCESS.bus, it topped out at a mere 100 kilobits per second, roughly the speed of ADB and significantly slower than even the initial version of USB. And it’s that standard that Foone Turing pointed out on Twitter in that locked-down 2019 thread: We have long left ACCESS.bus, our would-be contender for the USB throne, into the dustbin of history, but DDC is still at the root of how both HDMI and DisplayPort communicate with our computers.
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