+1 here. I already had a background on electronics and, lucky me, I burnt no parallel ports. When I joined the university I met a guy who built amateur solid

+1 here. I already had a background on electronics and, lucky me, I burnt no parallel ports. When I joined the university I met a guy who built amateur solid motor rockets and I designed and built a prototype atmospheric probe for it. It measured temperature and barometric pressure only, and a program in Delphi 7 downloaded the data from a PIC mcu via parallel port, displayed them in a grid and stored them in a Paradox table (by then, I didn't know there was a difference between databases and tables and couldn't understand all that excitement some of my colleagues felt about Oracle, MSSQL and alikes. "They are mere files to store tabular data", I used to think). By then, that was the most complex project I had built, and I can still feel the proud and the happiness so vividly. I was so ignorant about so many things that it didn't even occurr to me to look for information on the internet. And, anyway, it seems that the modus operandi by the time wasn't that -- nowadays we go right into the internet to look for the most suitable lib to the task. I just got the data sheets, the docs and examples installed along Delphi, and found my way through. It wasn't productive, but those were definitely good times.