I ran my entire physics thesis project on the parallel port, using homemade ADC, DAC, and stepping motor drivers. Turbo Pascal provided built-in functions for t

I ran my entire physics thesis project on the parallel port, using homemade ADC, DAC, and stepping motor drivers. Turbo Pascal provided built-in functions for the "port" i/o operations of the 8088 CPU. All's you needed was the address. A buddy of mine got an Apple Mac. It was lovely, except... no GPIO. But it had a serial port. Creating simple devices that could talk to the Mac serial port was my first introduction to microcontrollers. Of course, programming those microcontrollers required a device programmer, which I built and connected to... you guessed it... the parallel printer port of my PC.