And that reminded me of a childhood project where I hooked the user port (8 bit parallel) of one BBC up to another and wrote a chat program that sent data from

And that reminded me of a childhood project where I hooked the user port (8 bit parallel) of one BBC up to another and wrote a chat program that sent data from one machine to another by POKEing ASCII values IIRC. Not a million miles from what you could do with an IBM PC printer port. Not much use, the cable was about a foot long. My child's generation won't be able to do that, but I'm glad we have arduinos and ESP32s to fill the same niche.