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

[Nate]

> I'd say that the floppy drives still work well with the drivers  
> under MacOS
> 8 or 9.  I understand getting the maximum out of the beige  
> hardware, but
> they were never supported under OS X anyway. Complaining that the  
> OS you
> shoehorned onto an unsupported platform doesn't support hardware  
> that was
> never on a supported platform for the OS sounds silly to me.

Actually it was meant more as a real-world analogy, supporting the  
assertion that you can't rely on certain devices and device drivers  
(like parallel and serial).

In this case, I was pointing out how Macs that were officially  
supported under Mac OS X 10.0.0 through 10.2.8 never had a driver  
from Apple for hardware that they shipped with (a floppy drive), and  
that for those few people who are still using those machines, albeit  
unsupported through things such as XPostFacto, there is still no way  
to use that hardware except for an incomplete 6-year old open source  
floppy driver (that I could never get to work).

I consider my issues with the lack of floppy support in NetBSD/ 
OpenBSD/Linux/Darwin/OS X on Mac hardware to be not unlike other  
people's issues with parallel and serial - personal issues, and not  
that consequential.

- Nate