[rescue] Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]

[John Floren]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 3:22 AM, Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, der Mouse wrote:
>> Well put.  Nobody objects to different computers coming with different
>> capabilities when the differences are, say, number of CPUs
>> supported...but where's the "with or without a parallel port" choice?
>
> Particularly irritating is that the parallel port hardware is still
> present on a great many of the "southbridge" I/O controllers.  It's just
> disabled in a configuration register and not brought out to a physical
> port.  At the very least, it'd be nice for there to be a header somewhere
> (which would cost less than a penny, provided there's sufficient board
> space), so that the end-user could have a parallel port merely by
> connecting a cable.
>

I think I could probably deal with losing the parallel port (Goodbye,
dot-matrix printer) but the worst thing is the way it's getting harder
to get real serial ports. As with these parallel ports, the serial
hardware is on the motherboard, there's just nowhere to connect a
cable. They tell us to use USB to serial converters, but I do a lot of
debugging with serial consoles on Plan 9, and USB-serial doesn't work
so well there :(

John
-- 
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