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

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 09:49:56AM -0400, John Floren wrote:
>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 :(

Is it really that much of a problem? USB to parallel converters are sold
in lots of places and they work fine with printers. (I know, you have the
one that doesn't).

Serial ports are a different story, but if you are using *NIX as the 
operating system for the terminal emulator, or a Windows terminal program
instead of Procomm* in a dos box, it should work fine with one of those
PCI serial port cards. 

Geoff.

* I still use Procomm occasionaly, but most of the time I use minicom, a
Procomm clone for Linux. 
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM