It is easy to forget that many technology juggernauts weren’t always the only game in town. Ethernet seems ubiquitous today, but it had to fight past several competing standards. VHS and Blu-ray beat out their respective competitors. But what about USB? Sure, it was off to a rocky start in the beginning, but what was the real competition at that time? SCSI? Firewire? While those had plusses and minuses, neither were really in a position to fill the gap that USB would inhabit. But [Ernie Smith] remembers ACCESS.bus (or, sometimes, A.b) — what you might be using today if USB hadn’t taken over the world.