Seventeen connectors, oldest to newest. What each one does,
how to recognise it on sight, and why the shape stopped telling
you anything useful.

From the headphone jack — whose design goes back to telephone
switchboards in 1878 — to Thunderbolt 5, which looks exactly
like every other USB-C port on your laptop.

Along the way: why FireWire lost to a worse connector, why
Lightning was killed by a law rather than by technology, and
why USB naming got so bad that the standards body gave up on
version numbers entirely.

The one thing worth taking away: USB-C is a shape, not a
capability. Two identical ports can differ by a factor of
eighty in speed, and nothing on the outside tells you which
one you're holding.

⏱ CHAPTERS
00:00  3.5 mm headphone jack (1878)
00:45  Ethernet / RJ45 (1983)
01:18  VGA (1987)
01:53  FireWire (1995)
02:30  USB-A (1996)
03:10  DVI (1999)
03:46  SD card (1999)
04:27  HDMI (2002)
05:10  SATA (2003)
05:45  DisplayPort (2006)
06:20  Micro-USB (2007)
06:49  Thunderbolt 1 and 2 (2011)
07:23  Lightning (2012)
07:57  USB-C (2014)
08:45  Thunderbolt 3 and 4 (2015)
09:14  USB4 (2019)
10:02  Thunderbolt 5 (2024)
10:31  What to check before you buy

Spotted an error? Tell me in the comments and I'll pin the
correction.