The original USB specification was introduced in 1996, however, it wasn’t until two years later and v1.1 that it became a widely accepted standard. Its speed was 12Mbps which was good enough for its time but slowly and gradually, USB drives and peripherals started gaining market share and along with the introduction of Firewire, USB suddenly felt ultra-slow. Thus, USB2 was released in 2001 increasing the speed of USB to a whopping forty times at 480Mbps.



Link: TBreak