USB Montiors

Waging standard wars is one of those annoying, but unavoidable flaws in today’s setup of the technology industry. In a perfect world, there would only be one standard defining a technology, but the reality is that in a diverse environment as IT, there will always be different interests and there will always be customers at stake, sparking different ideas of how a certain technology should look like: Take the display segment, for example, and take a closer look at the history of interfaces will reveal a huge mess of D-SUB 15/DB-15, BNC, HDI-45, ADC, DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, DisplayPort. Has anyone ever thought about the idea of reusing another interface with a proven track record and that has been around for quite some time to connect a PC to a monitor… such as USB?

Of course there have been such people. Among those were Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Martin King, who were driven by the idea that multi-monitor setups should be less so complicated, which resulted in the founding of DisplayLink back in 2003. Initially, they worked on the idea to use Ethernet to connect a monitor to a PC, but quickly shifted their focus to USB. The technology made its market debut in 2007 as part of the 19″ Samsung SyncMaster 940UX monitor. Today, there are about 20 different products with DisplayLink chips available and there is more to come: We have no doubt that some of the products we saw down in Silicon Valley will create lots of buzz on gadget-crazy sites.
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