In an interview on YouTube, longtime Microsoft developer Raymond Chen reports how Windows 98 was made fit for the use of USB devices. Due to the USB death cart, equipped with 64 daisy-chained USB devices, blue screens were a daily occurrence on the test systems.
USB devices accompany our everyday lives. Be it the mouse, keyboard, or USB stick for quick data transfer. But this was not always the case. Only around the turn of the millennium did the technology slowly become standard for PC systems. Why the plug only works on one side, you can find out here.
This trend was also recognized by Microsoft, which took measures to ensure that its own Windows 98 worked seamlessly with USB devices. In this situation, the software manufacturer created the USB death cart. An office cart loaded with USB devices to challenge developers and their systems. Not every computer survived this encounter.
Microsoft’s USB death cart 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 cumbersome and not always successful.
Virtually every product with a USB port required its own individual driver, which had to be installed. Today, we additionally have to deal with different colors at USB ports.
Devices with USB connections flooded the market and forced Microsoft to act. The software manufacturer was therefore compelled to make its then-operating system Windows 98 fit for the smooth operation of USB devices.
So Microsoft decided to repurpose an office cart and load it with various USB devices. This construct confronted Windows 98 systems, and they typically “did not survive” the encounter.
The result was blue screens and crashes of the computers. Chen said in the YouTube video on Dave’s Garage: “You plugged in that one connector into the test machine, and the entire USB infrastructure would go haywire.”
How did the developers go about it? The cart was connected to a test station with a single USB cable. The installed Windows 98 could not handle the flood of devices wanting to connect to the system and quit its service. Blue screens and crashes were the consequence.
After that, it was the developers’ turn to find and eliminate the errors in the program code. The game repeated itself until the operating system ran stably.
To push the debugging to the limit, the connection to the USB cart was also interrupted after a few seconds and the cable was plugged back in a moment later.Even then, there were USB cables with a thick plastic part that serves an important function.
If a computer remained stable without crashing or blue screens, the connected USB devices were tested for their functionality. This way, errors were gradually fixed until a stable state was reached. Raymond Chen humorously remarked about this long testing procedure: “Congratulations, it crashed for a different reason.”
What kind of devices was the cart loaded with? To fully utilize the USB interface, 3 USB hubs were daisy-chained. In total, 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 cart and was simultaneously an entertaining way to maneuver the USB death cart. We owe this vehicle to the fact that USB could establish itself as a standard in Windows 98.
Tech YouTuber shows what happens when you connect 127 USB devices to a PC
