Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
… a fancy cable with electronics built into it so that either end of the cable could plug into the appropriate socket right-side-up or right-side-down. …
Sounds like a cable that never conformed to the official USB specifications.

That said, the official USB guys have cooked up a rather large range of specs over the years. Including some rather weird use cases.

A bunch of which have been deprecated but continue to confound people digging through their drawers of old USB gear.