[rescue] Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 01:35:21AM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> >From: Scott Newell <newell at cei.net>
> >Date: 2008/08/18 Mon PM 10:40:26 EDT
> >To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
> >Subject: Re: [rescue] Slightly OT:  Bad Cap Saga
> 
> >At 08:56 PM 8/18/2008, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> >>On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 10:52:25AM -0700, Curious George wrote:
> >>
> >> > I think most Dell sales (and HP, etc.) are just because there are
> >> > no practical alternatives (in the Wintel world)
> >>
> >>No practical alternatives?  How are iMacs, IBMs, HPs, or BOXX machines
> >>not practical alternatives?
> >
> >Can you even get a Mac with a true parallel port?  Dell workstations 
> >still have them (last time I checked), but I'm not sure about HP or IBM.
> 
> Compaq (and others I'm
> sure) flirted with the
> so-called "legacy free"
> designs, no serial or
> parallel ports, no PS/2
> ports either, just USB
> and an RJ-45 ethernet
> jack. They didn't sell
> well - I think most
> consumers "thought"
> they needed the miss-
> ing ports, and I sus-
> pect that most large
> corp. buyers had just
> enough exceptions in
> their user base that
> they couldn't stan-
> dardize on a "legacy
> free" model, dooming
> them to failure in
> the market.

What they did was just stop calling it legacy free, and started slipping
it out to a market that obviously didn't care enough to pay attention.
The last few Dell's I've been involved with the purchase of have lacked
PS2 ports.  And I don't believe the current low end desktop models have
parallel or serial.  I'm a bit saddened by missing serial, but I am not
at all sad about missing parallel.