I received the following email from G. Hutchinson this morning:

'I was reading another PC magazine the other day, and found an article on the USB specs. The item mentions that USB 1.1 has now been re-named 2.0 and there are now three USB 2.0 'specs'. There are USB standard (old USB 1.1), USB Hi-speed and USB Flat Out -- my son read the article and said it was not true. Are you aware of the situation?'

Now, I must say that G. Hutchinson is absolutely right in that the whole USB naming convention system at the moment is fairly nuts -- and we can thank some genius marketing executives for that, as I'll explain in a second.

Firstly, let's take a quick look at the state of play of USB. The original USB that we all know and love is USB 1.1. It has been included on motherboards as far back as the venerable Intel 430TX chipset for the Pentium processor, and has a maximum bandwidth of 12Mb/s (or 1.5MB/s).

In 1999 Intel launched an initiative to up the speed of USB with the next standard: USB 2.0. The main improvement was to increase the speed of the interface to 480Mb/s (60MB/s). USB 2.0 is also fully backward compatible with USB 1.1, so any USB 1.1 device can be plugged into a USB 2.0 port and should work straight away. However, you can't plug a USB 2.0 device into a standard USB 1.1 port and expect it to work.

So far so good. There's the old standard, and the new standard. But that's not all. Some marketing gurus decided it would be too confusing to consumers if they saw two different standards in the market. As such, they decided it would be best to drop the version numbers from the names, and call USB 2.0: USB Hi-Speed. Ambiguous, but it does state that this version is 'high speed', I guess.

This did leave a problem of how to distinguish USB Hi-Speed from the old USB 1.1, so now some call it USB Basic Speed, although I've also seen it referred to as Original USB. Magic.

So, in the attempt to reduce confusion by removing the version numbers, the marketing chumps have replaced them with ambiguous names that don't necessarily reflect the nature of the product. I don't know about you, but when I see two different devices, and one says USB 1.1, and the other USB 2.0, even if I know nothing of the specifications, I immediately know that the USB 2.0 device is going to be improved in some way.

On the other hand, if I see two products, and one says USB 2.0 and the other USB Hi-Speed - I just wouldn't know what to think.

Thanks marketing people. Thanks for just being you.

I can only guess the USB marketers are somehow related to the pillars of humanity who decided it would be a good idea for AMD to deceive the market with its Athlon XP performance rating convention. Bless them all.

And, I've never even heard of USB Flat Out.

For more information, you can check the official USB Implementers Forum Web site, and there's a great FAQ at Everything USB.