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As someone with both feet in the embedded development world, reading this from 1995 is fun: Note that even the RS232 port itself is a standard. And an inferio
by unwind 2y ago
As someone with both feet in the embedded development world, reading this from 1995 is fun:
Note that even the RS232 port itself is a standard. And an inferior one; sending stuff at 9600 baud over a 7 wire connection is a travesty by modern standards.
Note: RS232 is still around, and still relevant on modern systems. Not perhaps "actual" RS232 with the large voltage swing and negative voltage, but the UART signalling.
Also, I wonder what he would have preferred, USB was really really young then.
- relaxing 2y agoThere were some SCSI modems at the time.
- EricE 2y agoMy favorite were SCSI network adapters and SCSI "graphics cards". Ah, the days before USB!
- lizknope 2y agoAround 2010 I met a former coworker for lunch and he told me how they were running serial stuff really fast. I told him I was also working on high speed serial stuff. I asked him how fast and he said 115 kilobit/s. I told him I was working on 8 gigabit/s or around 70,000 times faster. At that point I had not used RS232 in over 10 years. I have a friend who still uses RS232 for lots of industrial factory type stuff in 2024.
- sillywalk 2y agoNitpick: USB 1.0 wasn't released until 1996.
- lproven 2y agoYup. Windows 95 first release did not support it. In only appeared with Windows 95 OSR2 a year later, alongside FAT32. In 1996 I got an IBM Pentium PC to review at PC Pro and it had these weird little rectangular ports on the back, with no pins, and a trident logo. I called IBM and asked what they were, and after bouncing around a dozen people until I got a techie, he told me they were "this new Intel thing" called a "unversal serial bus". I asked if it was some debugging kit, and he said no, it's meant to be this universal I/O standard. Then I got another long game of phone tag at Intel where nobody press-facing had ever heard of it. But nobody had any drivers for it, and there was nothing to plug into it, so it never even became a story. I can't remember now if I even wrote about it, but probably it was a passing mention. If so, I think I probably gave it the first coverage in the world.
- EricE 2y agoIf Apple hadn't adopted USB for the iMac, especially the fruity colored iMacs, which then spawned hundreds if not thousands of brightly colored accessories, who knows if it ever would have taken off on the PC side of things. I still see the occasional motherboard with a PS/2 port :p
- lproven 2y agoYes, agreed... on both.