In an interview on YouTube, long-time Microsoft developer Raymond Chen reports on how Windows 98 was made suitable for the use of USB devices. Due to the USB carriage of death, equipped with 64 USB devices connected in series, blue screens were commonplace on the test systems.
USB devices accompany our everyday life. Be it the mouse, keyboard or USB stick for quick data transfer. But this wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that the technology slowly became the standard for PC systems. You can find out why the plug only works on one side here.
Microsoft also recognized this trend and took measures to ensure that its own Windows 98 worked smoothly with USB devices. In this situation, the software manufacturer created the USB carriage of death. An office mail cart loaded with USB devices to challenge developers and their systems. Not every computer survived this encounter.
Raymond Chen in an interview at Dave’s Garage
Microsoft’s USB wagon of death brought Windows 98 to its knees
What was this cart full of USB devices for? Before the turn of the millennium, USB was not yet an established standard for connecting devices to the Windows operating system. The setup was complicated and not always successful.
Almost every product with a USB port required its own individual driver to be installed. Nowadays we also have to deal with different colors for USB ports.
Devices with USB ports entered the market and forced Microsoft to take action. The software manufacturer was therefore forced to make its then Windows 98 operating system suitable for the smooth operation of USB devices.
So Microsoft decided to repurpose an office mail cart and load it with various types of USB devices. Windows 98 systems were confronted with this construct and generally did not “survive” the encounter.
The result was blue screens and computer crashes. Chen said: “You put this one plug into the test machine and the entire USB infrastructure would go crazy.”
How exactly did the developers do this? The car was connected to a test station via a single USB cable. The installed Windows 98 could not cope with the flood of devices that wanted to connect to the system and quit the service. Blue screens and crashes were the result.
Then it was the developers’ turn and had to find and eliminate errors in the program code. The game repeated itself until the operating system was stable.
In order to take debugging (source code troubleshooting) to the extreme, the connection to the USB cart was sometimes interrupted after a few seconds and the cable was plugged back in a moment later. Even back then there were USB cables with a thick plastic part that had an important function.
If a computer remained without a crash or blue screen, the connected USB devices were tested for functionality. In this way, errors were gradually corrected until a stable state was reached. Raymond Chen said amusedly about this long testing procedure: “Congratulations, it crashed for another reason.”
What kind of equipment was the car loaded with? In order to fully utilize the USB interface, 3 USB hubs were connected in series. A total of 64 products were connected via USB. This included several mice, keyboards, printers, drives and other peripheral devices.
A USB steering wheel also found its place on the car and was also an entertaining way to maneuver the USB car of death. It is thanks to this vehicle that USB was able to establish itself as the standard in Windows 98.
Tech YouTuber shows what happens when you connect 127 USB devices to a PC