Microsoft Windows And The “USB Cart Of Death”

For all Microsoft’s efforts, it seems Windows and USB have never sat entirely easily together. Here <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/25/windows_usb_cart_of_death/> is a story from the early days, of how QA people (remember when Microsoft had QA people?) would torment kernel developers by wheeling in a cart laden with USB devices, all daisy-chained together, plugging them in to the test machine, pulling the plug out again, and watching the resulting crash. "The goal," said Chen, "was to get it to the point where you could plug in the USB Cart of Death and unplug it anytime you wanted, and everything would still work... and I think they made it." Note that “I think”. I suppose things are better nowadays, somewhat. I remember when I was starting to learn Android development, I was bemused to discover that Windows required a special USB driver in order to allow live debugging on a connected Android device. This was not necessary on any other platform--their built-in USB support was quite sufficient. And wouldn’t you know it, that limitation still applies to current versions of Windows <https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb>.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro