Source: Blog – Hackaday
The persistence of hobbyist communities reverse-engineering deprecated protocols reveals a critical gap in the “connected world” narrative: standardization winners (USB) often leave professional and specialized use cases stranded, creating both technical debt and unexpected dependencies that force grassroots workarounds rather than planned transitions. This pattern suggests that true interoperability requires not just dominant standards, but planned obsolescence pathways and legacy protocol preservation—a lesson as relevant to today’s AI model ecosystem as it was to FireWire.