A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports

StealMyWiFi writes "C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that's fairer."

Comments

modem port?

[Anonymous Coward]

no modem port? phone line port?

Re:modem port?

[compro01]

if you think dial up modems are obsolete, you evidently have never lived in a rural area in north america.

Re:modem port?

[zn0k]

or have had to provide out-of-band management.

Re:modem port?

[BrentH]

Which is, considering there's about eight people living in rural north america, a very likely option.

Re:modem port?

[Gordonjcp]

Does anyone use dialup modems for this any more? It's cheaper and easier to use GSM.

Re:modem port?

[node 3]

if you think dial up modems are obsolete, you evidently have never lived in a rural area in north america. Are there seriously any American cities that has cable TV and/or POTS phone service but does not offer cable internet or DSL? The number can't be that large.

Or, more apt, what percentage of the US population lives in an area without DSL or cable internet coverage? I'll bet it's smaller than the percentage that use FireWire.

WiFi is the new modem.

Re:modem port?

[xSauronx]

gsm is pricey and no better than a modem (if that good) in some areas i worked for a wISP in kansas, and one customer put our gear on a tower he had to get our service, because he hated dial up and tried his cell provider...but their nearest high speed tower was 35 miles away and literally dial up speeds (if that) also, he didnt want satellite because of the lousy speed/latency (our equipment was the same price, but much faster) fwiw, i came across more than one mint condition windows 98 CD while i was there as well, belonging to systems with *original* windows installs. talk about being creeped out. it was like a time vortex.

Re:modem port?

[Oktober Sunset]

obsolete tech is often found in use in backwards, 3rd world areas.
Sorry guys, it was just to easy, at least I didn't bring uneducated yokels into it.

Re:modem port?

[socsoc]

I know plenty of people who live somewhere between suburbia and rural who are only now beginning to receive cable(Internet, not TV) or DSL service availability to their homes. It's quite unfortunate, but there are service deprived pockets in populated areas.

Re:modem port?

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

Strangly enough I still use a ps2 mouse(via an adapter) and a ps2 keyboard.

What seems strange is that serial ports weren't included.

Re:modem port?

[Kozz]

My in-laws live just a 10-minute drive from Oshkosh, WI, which happens to be a college town also. But where they're at, they can't get DSL and the only cable company doesn't provide service any closer than 2 miles away. His only option for TV programming is satellite dish, and for Internet -- you guessed it, dial-up (blech!). And these days, nobody in their right mind would pay the going rates for ISDN.

Re:modem port?

[couchslug]

Quite right. There are and will remain many gaps in broadband coverage. Also, price pushes many poor folks away from broadband and to dialup.

Re:modem port?

[Tazmaster75]

Any time I reinstall Windows XP, I have to use a ps2 mouse and keyboard.

Re:modem port?

[glitch23]

if you think dial up modems are obsolete, you evidently have never lived in a rural area in north america.

Obsolete does not necessarily mean that it is no longer in use at all. From dictionary.com:

1. no longer in general use; fallen into disuse

In the case of dial-up modems, they are just no longer in general use given the proliferation of DSL and cable modem service for the majority of the U.S. population.

Re:modem port?

[suso]

This joke shows ignorance. There are actually more people living in rural America than in urban areas.

Re:modem port?

[kesuki]

one satellite provider includes dial-up capabilities in the box..

"SkyWay USA employs unique hybrid technology to maximize service and minimize cost. Research shows that most people using the internet generally have small upload requirements such as sending email or simple clicks while browsing web pages. SkyWay USA utilizes your phone line to send these small packets of data to the internet at regular dial-up speeds."

and countless tivo boxes use dialup, although tivo would like to migrate people over to tivo broadband.

albeit these are not exactly in the PC anymore, one of the nice things about national dialup (pre hot spot internet access etc) was that a laptop could go just about anywhere and dial up the internet, from anywhere with a national dial up provider.... now with laptops, you're running whatever speed the wi-fi access point lets you use.

GSM sucks, it was built to allow digital data transfer by PHONES not by computers, the new wireless auction results will allow some truly designed to offer high speed data for the masses over wireless, as well as allow phone companies to build in calea compliance mode for phones the government has wiretapped.

the reason why current phones can't send 'full quality audio' is there simply wasn't the bandwidth to do this and phones weren't designed to both compress a call, and send 'full quality audio' at the same time, being totally transparent to the end user (which for a court ordered wiretap is the normal mode, only the judge and the cops know who is being wiretapped, at the time of tapping)

full quality audio is required to get 'background conversations' I'm kinda surprised that they didn't tie in some sort of requirement for the phone companies to send still photos of where the phone user is at the time the call takes place too (since most phones have a camera in them too, and calea was so broad in what it required in the first place) although if they had, undoubtedly the informed criminal would just get some white out and apply it to the lens of the camera (or otherwise block the lens)

Re:modem port?

[corrosive_nf]

I used to live in a city of 250,000 in southern california and could not get not anything but dialup. So yeah, there are cites.

Re:modem port?

[cthulhu11]

I (well the company) paid for ISDN for the first year or so when I moved to my current place. Analog dialup was way too slow and unreliable for telecommuting, and the group/BU I was in then wouldn't spring for a DS1 (which I have now). Comcrap's cable plant stops about 2 miles away. I'm close enough to Verizon's site that I could get DSL but they can't be bothered to put a DSLAMM in there -- which as we've seen here seems to be standard Verizon policy these days, though there are some areas just as remote as mine (6-7 miles from the state highway with incorporated city).

Re:modem port?

[Rolgar]

I live just outside of my state's capital, and I'm fortunate to live in a neighborhood that has cable TV, or I'd be stuck with dial-up.

We're considering moving across town, less than 2 miles from the nearest densely populated area, to an area where nice houses are lined up on country roads, but the house doesn't have any options for DSL or Cable. You'd think the cable company would want to put service in houses that cost above $200,000 since those people would probably be more likely to be able to pay for $100 packages, but for some reason they won't.

Re:modem port?

[driftingwalrus]

Does anyone use dialup modems for this any more? It's cheaper and easier to use GSM. I'm going to assume you don't live in Canada. Data over the cellular network here is still a horrifically expensive option.

Re:modem port?

[CronoCloud]

No, most of america's population is Urban and lives in or near urban areas.

Take Illinois for example, most of the population is concentrated in and near Chicago.

Re:modem port?

[Tuidjy]

Serial ports are not obsolete. I work at a company with quite a few million dollars
worth of CNC machine tools, robotic cells, and assembly lines, and all of the equipment
is controlled or updated through DB9 or DB25 serial ports. Yes, the modern stuff comes
with RJ45 (Ethernet) ports. But the serial is always there, and as usually there is one PC
per building controlling all the equipment, it's always the serial that gets used.

Furthermore, all the scanning equipment, and all the heavy duty label printers use
serial ports. Once again, we could buy USB ones, but we do not want to change anything
that we do not have to. So we keep buying RS232 scanners, modems, printers, you name it.

At least two of the plants next to ours are doing the same thing. Manufacturing in the
US is hurting. Changing for the sake of changing is not happening where I can see it.

Re:modem port?

[try_anything]

This joke shows ignorance. There are actually more people living in rural America than in urban areas. --

Use saferdomainsearch.com [saferdomainsearch.com] to safely search for domain availability.

Use google.com to safely search for accurate information about American demographics.

Re:modem port?

[Gordonjcp]

GSM sucks, it was built to allow digital data transfer by PHONES not by computers, the new wireless auction results will allow some truly designed to offer high speed data for the masses over wireless, as well as allow phone companies to build in calea compliance mode for phones the government has wiretapped

GSM provides 9600 baud. How fast is the management port on your router? Unless it's relatively new, I'm going to guess it's 9600 baud. Incidentally most of the rest of the world has inexpensive high-speed data using GPRS or 3G. IF the US didn't have such a godawful telephone system where everything is choked to death by the monopolistic practices of a handful of companies, they'd have it too.

Re:modem port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they are obsolete and so are those people living there.

Re:modem port?

[bhtooefr]

However, that does bring up an interesting point.

Nowadays, with all the taxes on landline phones, it's often cheaper to get a cell phone and cable internet than it is a landline and dialup.

Re:modem port?

[Nursie]

"This joke shows ignorance. There are actually more people living in rural America than in urban areas."

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYY out there. 80% of the US population live in urban and suburban areas.

Re:modem port?

[skolima]

Wait, you mean USA is so much beyond the rest of the world that you don't have cheap 3G (UMTS/HSDPA/etc) available? Poland is not exactly a world leader in telecommunication, but for about 27$ a month you'll get a wireless network connection that's much, much more usable than the dial-up. It's hard not to consider those old ports obsolete - at least in Europe ;-)

For technical details - one gets a theoretical 7.2Mbps speed in cities (1Mbps practical), about 240kbps in rural areas, and if you download more than 1GB a month, your downstream may get cut to 80kbps (subject to network load).

Re:modem port?

[R.Mo_Robert]

He said rural area. (Newsflash: not everybody lives in a city. I live in the country about a 5 miles away from the nearest town, which has less than 400 people. They have DSL as an option, but if you live more than a couple miles out, no such luck.)

C-Net

[Etrias]

C-net couldn't find an obsolete port with two hands, a map and a flashlight.

Re:C-Net

[corbettw]

Which is ironic, since C-net, maps, and flashlights are all obsolete themselves.

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

C-net couldn't find an obsolete port with two hands, a map and a flashlight

In the daytime, standing in front of it.

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly have flashlights been obsoleted by?

Re:C-Net

[octaene]

Not trolling for karma points, but this might be the best comment I've ever seen on Slashdot. Great job, submitter!

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

Cell phone displays.

Re:C-Net

[gardyloo]

Girls.

    Oh... sorry. I thought you said fleshlights.

Re:C-Net

[Beardo the Bearded]

LED flashlights.

Mine has a voltage detector built into it.

Re:C-Net

[fm6]

Indeed, the writer was just a little clueless. I did enjoy learning about SCART, a connector I never heard of before. But the writer first says that it was a good idea (a single cable for all AV signals), then complains that it was impossible to identify which signals a SCART cable carried. Maybe the not such a good idea after all?

Re:C-Net

[jellomizer]

That and I think they missed some Big ones.
Serial 9 pin and 15 pin,
CGA Video,
VGA,
ATA Keyboard,
DIP Switches,
Jumpers,
Many Generations of Memory Slots

But what I mess most is Serial and Parallel. It was great easy to make hardware and have it interact with your computer. And most OS's even good old DOS had easy to use ways of accessing the Com Port information. USB often adds an extra level of complexity for home job hardware.

Re:C-Net

[Zombywuf]

Over here in Europe everything has them. As mentioned in the article. Just below the bit where it says they're obsolete.

Has obsolete been redefined?

And where is RS232? What about midi/joystick ports? This is just blatant C-Net karma^Hpagerank whoring and it was allowed in without a second thought.

Re:C-Net

[poopdeville]

I think he meant that the SCART had the potential to be something like USB for TV, but that the implementation was flawed.

Re:C-Net

[Ragzouken]

I don't know how SCART can be considered obsolete, it's pretty much the standard these days.

Re:C-Net

[commodoresloat]

Nothing -- it's just that after Bill Gates was asked to change a lightbulb, darkness was declared the new standard.

Re:C-Net

[hattig]

No one in Europe would buy a TV that didn't have at least one SCART socket today, and two would be desirable. It's not obsolete in any way, shape or form (although HDMI will replace it in about 5 years, so it doesn't have a future). Lots of people have extensive SCART switching equipment to get all their AV gear connected to the limited number of ports on their TV. I bet most people a few years ago would have said that about 5 SCART inputs on a TV would be ideal. The RGB support, even if limited to a single SCART socket on the TV, has meant that usually at least the satellite TV or DVD player had a really decent connection to the home TV, which along with PAL has probably explained the slower uptake of HDTV over here.

ADB is an example of an obsolete connector. Why is this article talking about active, popular ports as being obsolete, or did it travel backwards in time 10 years?

Re:C-Net

[Hatta]

Flashlights have been obsoleted by flashlights?

Re:C-Net

[vought]

Oh... sorry. I thought you said fleshlights. Well, they are pretty close to Good Vibrations.

Not that I go there. For that.

Re:C-Net

[lgw]

SCSI is a very interesting case: the SCSI port is dead and gone, but the SCSI protocol is used more than ever. In addition to iSCSI and SAS and Fibre Channel storage in the datacenter, USB storage all uses the SCSI command set for some reason.

Re:C-Net

[Beardo the Bearded]

Yes. They're very enterprisey now.

You aren't still using a plain flashlight with an incandescent bulb, are you? ;)

Re:C-Net

[PitaBred]

Just get a USB->Serial adapter. They work pretty well, believe it or not. You can just treat them just like a "normal" serial port most of the time...

Re:C-Net

[gad_zuki!]

Yeah they missed some pretty other obvious:

qotd 17/udp Quote of the Day
gopher 70/tcp Gopher
finger 79/tcp Finger
pcmail-srv 158/tcp PCMail Server
audit 182/tcp Unisys Audit SITP

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit, a joke from 1995. Never thought I'd see one of those again.

Re:C-Net

[MorePower]

And where is RS232?

That's the port that computer makers keep trying to force into obsolescence, despite the fact that we still desperately need them to talk to all the tons of legacy industrial equipment installed all over the world in the last 20 years. Don't encourage them, I need my RS232 ports.

Oh yeah, USB to RS232 works, sometimes.

Re:C-Net

[billcopc]

Yep, SCART beats the pants off of our crappy American connections, and it's been around since the 70's. While it can't compete with modern HD component (YPbPr), it's still way cleaner and more accurate than S-Video with little artifacting. Plus it's relatively easy to mod a SCART output into VGA, to hook up those old game consoles to a computer display.

Re:C-Net

[Kamokazi]

9-pin serial is stil used by many things, generally more in a business setting though. VGA is still used much more than DVI or other connectors, and works fine.

Re:C-Net

[Mr2001]

USB uses an antiquated SCSI command set, unfortunately. That's why, even though you can fit 4 TB or more into a Drobo, it has to be split up into 2 TB volumes.

Re:C-Net

[geekboy642]

If you're lucky. And you can find one of the USB->Serial adapters that's worth the plastic packaging it's shipped in. And your device happens to use a restricted set of serial functionality. I've never been that lucky. I'm looking at YOU, Ti-85 Serial PC Link Cable!

Re:C-Net

[Dahamma]

Guess you should stop buying Macs, almost all of these are still thriving in other applications.

Serial 9 pin and 15 pin

Still ubiquitous in manufacturing and embedded engineering

CGA Video

Oh come on this was obsolete in 1985

VGA

Not at ALL.

ATA Keyboard

Using one right now. Keytronic Lifetime Series really means what it says...

DIP Switches

See comment on serial ports

Jumpers

See comment on DIP switches

Many Generations of Memory Slots

See comment on jumpers. Where that doesn't apply, big deal.

Re:C-Net

[QuoteMstr]

I use qotd all the time, you insensitive clod!

Seriously, it's a pity such a memorably low port number was allocated to such a useless service. Does IANA have a port revocation policy?

Re:C-Net

[MT628496]

serial port? Configure any network hardware lately?

Re:C-Net

[dmsuperman]

That's why it's called obsolete, it means that if you're using it and it's been deemed obsolete then it's time to upgrade.

Don't act like it's a short notice thing either, we STILL have parallel and serial ports, and PS/2 ports in the back of our machines. I haven't (even in any workplace I've seen) seen them used, and I know that almost everything connected to your PC is now either VGA, DVI, 3.5mm, USB, or over the network. I'm not saying that they should remove the ports now, but when they give you this long to upgrade from PS/2 to USB, then don't complain when they finally say it's time to move on for real.

Re:C-Net

[entrigant]

Hey! I run a qotd server on my machine! Don't take my port away!

Re:C-Net

[driftingwalrus]

90% of these cables use the FTDI FT232 chip. There are some issues, I don't recall it really being 12 volt as RS-232 should be. It won't work with certain PIC programmers. But it does make it easy to put USB on a device:)

Re:C-Net

[bXTr]

And where is RS232?

It went with R2D2 and C3PO to sneak aboard the Death Star.

Re:C-Net

[TapeCutter]

FTFA : "it's nearly impossible to say PCMCIA at all, without getting all the letters jumbled up and your technological pants tied in a knot"

I agree, he didn't do his reaearch. The quote above describes an early marketing bug, a meme was quickly released with the following solution...

PCMCIA = "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronymns"

Re:C-Net

[adolf]

I miss finger. Back when the net was much more naive -- when everyone's mail server had port port 25 open and would gladly relay mail for anyone -- one could find some hapless nit on IRC, finger their ISP's terminal server, snag their user name, derive from that their real name, find their home address in a telephone directory, and fire up Mapblast or Terraserver and spook the hell out them by saying things like "That's a nice lake that you live next to. The water is very pretty this time of night, isn't it?"

Now that I think of it, it's really surprising that I didn't wind up in jail when I was a kid.

I think I'll install fingerd on my WRT54G and stuff some random information into it, just for old time's sake.

Re:C-Net

[init100]

SATA also uses the SCSI command set. That's why SATA drives need the SCSI subsystem in older Linux kernel versions (now they use libata).

Re:C-Net

[Mattsson]

maps, and flashlights are all obsolete themselves. That's just silly.
Maps in paper or electronic form is no longer needed?
And no one needs portable, wireless light-devices either? :-)

Re:C-Net

[jimicus]

Just get a USB->Serial adapter. They work pretty well, believe it or not.

I think what you meant to say is "They usually work pretty well, but fail to do so a non-trivial amount of the time - and there's no way of knowing if you've been lucky until such time as you've opened the packaging and tried to use it, by which time it's too late to return".

Disclaimer: My employer develops embedded software - we've got all sorts of USB-Serial adaptors.

Re:C-Net

[DKlineburg]

As long as your not using that ah... well .. "interesting" flash light that you have to shake to light up. . . Seen here the hand in the middle of the picture says it all. . . Just say no! What kind of person thinks of this?

Re:C-Net

[demonlapin]

So which ones actually work? I ponied up for the USB->PS/2 adapter that actually works for the Model M; I'm not afraid to drop a little extra on a serial adapter that does the same.

Re:C-Net

[pacman on prozac]

RS232 is handy if you need access to anything by Cisco, Nokia, Juniper, etc.

Most networking devices I've seen use RS232 ports for management and often the first step of configuring them has to be done via the serial console. RS232 will be around a while yet.

Oh yeah, USB to RS232 works, sometimes.

Those adapters are great fun when some critical networking device goes down, plug in the USB console adapter and get "driver missing" errors. They seem to have some form of autosense that triggers these faults when the driver CD is at least 100miles away. One reason why an old laptop running linux is a vital network support tool ;)

Re:C-Net

[jimicus]

I wish I could answer you that.

Unfortunately, the PC hardware market is a fickle beast, and manufacturers change the chipset they use at the drop of a hat - sometimes without changing the model number they market the product under.

The best advice I can give you is to buy 3 or 4, then when you've found one which works reliably buy several of them immediately afterwards - with any luck you won't be timing the purchase just as the manufacturer is switching chipsets.

This works fine when you've got 20 people to buy for and you know they'll all need a working USB-Serial adapter. If it's just you, it gets fairly expensive fairly quickly.

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

octaene (171858) wrote:
Not trolling for karma points, but

If you're not trolling for karma points, try selecting the "Post Anonymously" checkbox before you submit. It works great.

Re:C-Net

[arth1]

There's a good argument to having a PS/2 port, and that is that it runs on its own IRQ with low-level drivers. If you have a runaway app, it's nice to have a working CTRL-ALT-DELETE that won't be delayed two minutes because USB is slowed down with the rest of the system.

Re:C-Net

[jellomizer]

Yes it didn't have a serial port to plug in an external modem. We were quite annoyed when that happened last year. We just expected a normal PC with normal ports the the Dell didn't have any serial ports... The Serial to USB converter was just as bad it only worked 80% of the time. Not good enough for our use. And yes we were using Linux.

Re:C-Net

[TERdON]

Uh, there is still a lot of industrial (and embedded) equipment still being shipped which is still only accessible over serial connection. It's not even closely as obsolete as you suggest...

Re:C-Net

[Digi-John]

Anybody who does real computing (Yeah, your Alienware is cool, I'm not talking about that) probably wants RS232. I use it all the time to get console on a variety of devices. You all may be familiar with the BlueGene supercomputers? The development board I use to test things for that platform uses RS232 for a console.
USB to RS232 is crap.

Re:C-Net

[tooth]

i haven't used this yet: http://asashi.net/pages/pitux.html

Re:C-Net

[MikeBabcock]

The D-Link models are no better. A straight motherboard RS-232 port works so much better when connecting to a modem or serial printer.

Yes, I use serial printers with work.

Lava's PCI serial cards were at the top of my recommendation list back when they worked with most computers, but now I find a lot of machines (Dell!) won't even boot with them installed.

Digi makes intelligent I/O cards that work quite well up to 19200 but their Linux drivers are incredibly bad and there's a lot of glitches at 38400 and above.

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean I was wrong when I called it puck-muck-ee-ah? LOL

Re:C-Net

[Cramer]

That's not a SCSI issue. But, yes, USB storage sucks.

Re:C-Net

[fm6]

Nobody will ever need more than 2 TB!

Re:C-Net

[Anonymous Coward]

C-Net is an obsolete port(al)

SCSI isn't what it used to be

[eln]

SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up, no matter how you chained them or where you put the terminator. The only way to get it working was to cut yourself trying to connect the third drive for the 500th time and bleed all over the cables while swearing loudly. After that, everything would work just fine. You see, the dark lord will not allow SCSI to work without a blood sacrifice.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I haven't purchased a SCSI part in nearly 10 years. Once SATA became relatively commonplace and 3Ware was shown to be reliable, I just never looked back. On the highest of the high end where budget isn't a constraint I guess it might still be useful. Otherwise, stick a fork in it.

Cheers,

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Coraon]

I found it also helped if I sacrificed virgin RAM it helped also.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[NMerriam]

Oh, come on. SCSI will *always* be fun, termination or not. Just the act of putting an adaptor on an adaptor on another adaptor so that you can connect a controller to a disk is an adventure. Just calculating the minimum number of adaptors you need to own to be able to connect any two arbitrary SCSI devices could keep Stephen Hawking busy for an afternoon.

SCSI is one of those technologies where you inevitably wonder "how can engineers be so brilliant, and yet so colossally stupid, at the same time?"

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[calebt3]

I found it also helped if I sacrificed virgin RAM it helped also. Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[jimicus]

You can't get 15Krpm drives in SATA variants, and SAS will allow you to bond up to 4 3Gbps channels together into one bit 12Gbps channel. (Not that it does you much good unless you've got a fairly hefty array as otherwise there's no way a disk subsystem will sustain 3Gbps in random access usage).

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[stonecypher]

Wow, and if they were talking about the SCSI wire protocol, instead of the SCSI-1 port, that might be germane.

Way to miss the point.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Gr8Apes]

I haven't purchased a SCSI part in nearly 10 years. That would be because SCSI is so darn reliable. My Mylex 1164 and 9 and 18 GB drives are still running fine, except I chunked the drives in favor of 36GB drives about 6 years ago.... what was I saying about reliability again?

Once SATA became relatively commonplace and 3Ware was shown to be reliable, I just never looked back. On the highest of the high end where budget isn't a constraint I guess it might still be useful. Otherwise, stick a fork in it. SCSI is still faster, and last time I checked, it was very very difficult to make a 200+ drive RAID tower out of SATA drives. (It's been a few years...)

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[imsabbel]

But SAS is electrically more or less identical to SATA. So it doesnt go against the 500 different SCSIs as an obsolete (physical layer) interface

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[geekoid]

Enjoy your dirty writes.

I have two 3.2ms SCSI drives that took about 2 minutest to install.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[rthille]

I went thru that once...finally I isolated it to the cable. The F'ing cable was bad! Swapping it for a different cable everything worked. The three external SCSI drives, the SCSI scanners (plural!), everything!

So, to be evil I put the cable in my coworker's box of cables.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[hostyle]

SCSI is still faster, and last time I checked, it was very very difficult to make a 200+ drive RAID tower out of SATA drives. (It's been a few years...)

Indeed it has. Babel was demolished long ago ... I never could figure out where they found enough PSUs for that damned tower either. Maybe they used biblical Pillars of Salt?

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kinda like USB in that regard, though, isn't it? Just look at the incredible variety of USB plugs and sockets there is - it' quite incredible really.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[pilgrim23]

thank you thank you thank you thank you!!! that sooo needed to be said...
SCSI they mention, but not one word of SASI; SCSI's grandfather. SCSI...
one might say...is SASI with Shugart coating ;)
For a SCSI terminator I prefer a plasma rifle in the 40 watt range..
000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Ephemeriis]

These days SCSI is serial, just like ATA. Modern drives use SAS, or Serial Attached SCSI, and they'll still blow the doors off SATA drives. If you absolutely, positively, have to connect massive numbers of very fast drives - SAS is the way to go. Far more bandwidth available than anything SATA has to offer.

And...I still use good ol' parallel SCSI all the time. Lots of tape drives still use it. I just installed a new server last month with an external LTO drive connected with SCSI.

SCSI is about as far from "obsolete" as you can get when it comes to servers.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[caerwyn]

And if you'd read the post it was a response to, you'd see that it was a perfectly germane response to a comment about SATA.

Way to miss the point.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[lgw]

The SCSI interface chip on the drive doesn't make it any more reliable. Somewhere along the way most sevrer drives moved to SAS, but the high-margin, use SCSI as a "high end" badge. It's a weird sort of brand management.

The big RAID towers are available in SATA these days (they all have a Fibre Cannel connection to the host, but internally you can get SCSI or SATA cabinets, or probably SAS by now).

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[sjames]

And of course, let's not forget the connector screws where 1/1000th of a turn was the difference between a 'loose' error prone connection and a broken off screw. And who can forget the cables that were fully as flexible as rebar.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[lgw]

As one of those engineers let me say: it still takes less fiddling than supporting all of the HTML and browser/version "standards". :)

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[lgw]

Almost every SCSI problem ever was either (1) someone went too cheap on the cable, or (2) someone went too cheap on the terminator (the rest of the problems were devices that didn't conform to the standard fighting with one another).

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[keeboo]

SCSI wasn't any fun anymore once they put in auto termination anyway. Long ago are the days when you couldn't get your SCSI disks to show up,

I find it strange that certain people complain about SCSI termination and IDs. This stuff is very logic, you just repect that and the cable length and normally you won't have problems.
Sure, there are people who plug a single hard-disk in an unterminated bus, it happens to work, then the guy swears at, after adding a second device and everything stopped. Complaining about things do not work when you don't respect its requirements is just stupid.

If one wanted to complain about SCSI, I think that the variety of available connectors is a good reason. Also annoying was to deal with HVD vs LVD issues.

Anyways, complain what you want about SCSI, but hot-plug (SCSI) SCA HDs are way more mechanically viable compated to hot-plug SATA (direct connection, no intermediate connector).

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[sjames]

SCSI is still faster, and last time I checked, it was very very difficult to make a 200+ drive RAID tower out of SATA drives. (It's been a few years...)

Of course, a single SATA drive has more capacity than that whole array did and costs less than a month's worth of electricity.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Mephistro]

Thank you, Mr. eln. The best post I've read in years, still ROFL I have shared that same experience a few times, too.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[thesupraman]

SAS bandwidth, 1.5 or 3.0 GBit/second, SATA bandwidth, 1.5 or 3.0 GBit/second
SAS has TCQ, SATA has NCQ for command overlapping.
SAS has multipath IO, SATA has port multipliers
SAS cables are rated to 8m, SATA at 1m, hmm an actual difference!
Try to learn something before you start spouting crap.
SAS is available with lower latency drives (15krpm), SATA can easy match it in bandwidth.

Anyone serious uses FC for big arrays anyway, go look at a TPC-C lead benchmark some time.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[russotto]

That would be because SCSI is so darn reliable.

Heh. Who would have believed that anyone would say this about an interface that was once famous for requiring animal sacrifice rituals to make it work.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[mstromb]

Incredible variety? There are four types: A, B, and the mini variants of each.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Ecuador]

I really haven't used SCSI much, but even so I do remember having seen many more SCSI connectors in my lifetime than what you describe. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_connector for example supports this. Maybe you are young and you only count the ones you can find in new devices?
In any case, also remember that the number of adaptors is not the same as the number of connectors (nCr). While it would be "just" 6 for your proposed 4 connectors, the wikipedia describes 9 connectors (which would make 36 adapters) and the article implies there are even more.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[1u3hr]

Almost every SCSI problem ever was either (1) someone went too cheap on the cable, or (2) someone went too cheap on the terminator

But why does a SCSI cable have to cost 20 times as much as any other cable I've ever bought?

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[lgw]

SCSI always pushed the limits of what you could do with the technology of the day, and parallel busses are hard to begin with. The impedance of the wires had to be right, the correct pairs of wires had to be twisted together, and you *really* couldn't get away with using a single shared ground wire.

Each doubling of speed on the SCSI cable was sufficiently hard to pull off that cables which were fine for the previous generation simply wouldn't cut it for the new generation, but you can't tell by looking at a cable what speed it was made for.

I think the final SCSI parallel standard didn't even support cables, it was only for backplanes in RAID cabinets.

Well, that's all fixed with SAS. Parallel is just too hard to go forward with.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[1u3hr]

Why does a few extra ground wires cost $20 more? Ultimately, it's just a bundle of copper wires and couple of connectors.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Tuidjy]

Mostly, neither have I, recently. The last time I bought SCSI drives was when the 15K were
released. Still, all three of my PCs have SCSI drives in them. They last forever, and
transfer them from PC to PC. XP floored me by autodetecting them. :-)

By the way, in one of the PCs, one of the drives whines like a jet turbine on take off.
But it's a mirror, so I am waiting for it to kneel over.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just a reflection on the bus from the missing terminator.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Rich0]

Uh, he was talking about USB. The post he replied to suggested that scsi wasn't any worse than USB in numbers of connectors.

USB has 4. SCSI has some number that might be countable using the set of integers - I'm not sure if that has been proven yet.

Even so, USB probably should only have 1 connector - or maybe 1 big and one small. Yes, I know the others have their reasons for existing, but I'm sure there is another way to do things...

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[xkillkillx]

And don't forget the lesser known, yet painfully incompatible http://www.paralan.com/sediff.htmldifferential (HVD) SCSI . Same connectors, but 48V. Very efficient for blowing regular scsi hardware if you mix them up in the same chain...

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[NMerriam]

To be fair to the AC, the issue has been a number of vendors for some inexplicable reason inventing their own proprietary mini connectors that are sometimes only fractionally smaller than the official minis. I've got a couple of cables I *have* to hang on to because they're the only ones with that particular connector.

But it doesn't compare at all to the SCSI issue, since the proprietary USB connectors are intended to be 1-way connections -- ie, you'll only ever use the special cable to plug the special device into the computer, there is no necessity to ever chain the weird connections because USB doesn't support chaining in that way, and even if it did, there wouldn't be any meaningful way to chain the often tiny portable devices that use the crazy connectors. I've never seen a normal desktop-bound USB device that bothered to use anything other than official USB spec connectors.

Indeed, the success of the USB connector standardization has meant that even non-computer devices are now using them as simple power connections, since they are familiar to users and its easy to find chargers for any situation.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Ecuador]

Hehe, you are right, I didn't notice the hidden post he was answering to - I must confess I was using IE7 last night and the thread navigation is not as good as on Firefox... No, USB can definately NOT be compared to SCSI... Sorry to GGP for the reply ;)

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[bluephone]

Let's see, there's A and B, mini-A, mini-B 5 pin, two variants of the 4 pin (yes, unrecognized but out there), Micro-A -B and -AB, now USB3 Standard A, USB3 New-A, USB New-B, USB3 Micro-B, USB3 optical links, oh, and all of the above in in male and female. A few more than 4.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Gr8Apes]

It's getting close these days, but the performance on those tower arrays was something to behold... matched by a 6 SATA drive software RAID 0 set of drives these days..... ;)

Don't forget, you could get 1GB/s continuous data transfers on those systems, and that was something.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[sjames]

It's getting close these days, but the performance on those tower arrays was something to behold... matched by a 6 SATA drive software RAID 0 set of drives these days..... ;)

They did have some great performance, especially for their day. Beating them now isn't by any means trivial, but it is a lot easier and cheaper. The big heavy cabinet with the increadible whirring sound (especially on the sequential power-up) made them FEEL powerful and important as well. In another 10 years we'll probably have keyfobs that outperform them.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Lumpy]

Call me when you can get 128 SATA drives in a raid 50 array on a single server.

My SCSI drives will kick the ever living crap out of your BEST SATA drives you can buy in speed, quality and outright performance.. I have a 18 TERABYTE array that can not be replicated with low grade SATA drives.

It's why real servers and powervaults dont use sata but scsi still. when you scale to real enterprise level on a server you cant use a toy like SATA.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Kadin2048]

... And a fighter jet is really just a pile of aluminum sheet-metal scraps; why the hell does it cost so much?

It's mostly in the construction. In a parallel bus, if the various wires inside the cable aren't all of the same length and twisted properly, you'll get problems. Same if the shielding is bad, or if the connections between the wires and the pins aren't great. And of course, if you make the wires with thin, heavily-adulterated copper to begin with, it's all downhill from there.

A plant that's producing cables with an emphasis solely on cost-per-unit probably isn't going to be as attentive to minute details, like the number of turns put into various pairs, or maintaining a consistent temperature in the solder when the pins are being attached (too cold and you get bad joints and whiskers). They're almost certainly not going to be breaking out a time-domain reflectometer to test them against the spec before packaging -- you're probably lucky if they even bother to slap a continuity tester on and make sure all the pins are connected. Quality control isn't necessarily cheap, and at least in my experience it seems to be the first thing to go.

Like any other product, at the very high end there are probably SCSI cables that are more snake oil than anything really different, but there's a vast difference between 'good' cables and bargain-bin/generic ones. Admittedly, sometimes with the cheap ones you get lucky (I'm not going to lie, I have a few sitting around from desperation purchases of one sort or another), but it's always a gamble. You pay for consistency.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Cramer]

And that single SATA drive will last about 18mo, on average. On the other hand, I have SCSI array's that are a decade old and still going strong.

Say what you will about why, but SCSI hardware lasts much, MUCH longer than cheap IDE, ATA, SATA crap. Just becase Seagate, WD, etc. give a 5 year warantee on the drive doesn't mean it'll last that long -- I've not seen one out live it's warantee yet. I have a Maxtor SCSI-1 drive that's now 15 years old and still running perfectly. (yes, it's only 213MB. I did say it was 15yrs old.)

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[Cramer]

You forgot about SAS channel bonding... up to 4 channels == 12Gbit.

The real difference... SCSI drives have a long standing, proven record of reliability. SAS is still two new to tell. However, SAS drives are built in the same factories with the same processes as "cheap crap" SATA drives. So, I really doubt they will have the same quality and reliability we've come to expect from SCSI hardware. Only time will tell.

Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be

[sjames]

I'm not convinced of a big difference there. I have PATA drives over 10 years old. I had an ancient RLL drive as well. It was retired when the controller card died since replacments were basically impossible by then. I've also seen SCSI drives last under 2 years.

Of course, in a nice RAID 6, I could have SATA drives failing in 12 months and STILL come out cheaper than SCSI drives even when man hours are included.

There are two things that distort the stats. First, there ARE no crappy bargain basement SCSI drives for sale. They're all expensive high end stuff. Two, there are no 1TB SCSI drives out there. Higher density drives tend to be more failure prone because they're closer to the edge of what's possable for the given technology. Even comparing high end drives, the SATA are still cheaper and bigger and have failure rates resembling the SCSI drives.

My favorite obsolete port is #23

[stuporglue]

Although I've still had to use it in the last couple years for a couple of odd routers.

This cracks me up

[microbee]

Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.

Re:This cracks me up

[Archangel Michael]

Crap, I hate you. And my apologies to SNL, Chevy Chase and Jane Curtain but here it goes ....

USB you Electronic Slut

Re:This cracks me up

[Dever]

nobody ever ever gets the 'jane, you ignorant slut.' jokes though. invariably some has to to do this:

regarding Saturday Night Live and its Weekend Update skits:

A frequent feature of Update during this time was Point-Counterpoint, in which Curtin and Aykroyd made vicious and humorously inappropriate ad hominem attacks on each other's positions on a variety of topics, in a parody of the 60 Minutes segment of the same name ...

Aykroyd regularly began his reply with "Jane, you ignorant slut," which became another of the many SNL catch phrases. (Curtin frequently began her reply with, "Dan, you pompous ass".)

there, now i have passed the torch to someone else who will explain this joke to the slash audience in a year or two again...

Re:This cracks me up

[Mr2001]

See also Count-Pointercount, from the Kentucky Fried Movie around the same time:

John Fitzsimmons: Well Sheila, I guess even you and your liberal cronies have found the light at the end of love with our beloved president. The intellectuals have been much agitated and now, having gotten the presidency by exploiting the problems they themselves have manufactured, he has done his best to fuel their anxieties about him. Sheila. Will you and your pack of bleeding heart liberals never learn that expanding welfare roles only accelerate inflation and inevitably hurt most those they purport to help?

Sheila Hamilton: Why John, you old stick in the mud. I've been listening to that horse shit of yours for months, and you can take that crap and blow it out your ass. And for good measure, sit on THIS [flips the bird], John.

Re:This cracks me up

[Elbowgeek]

One thing which disappointed me when IBM introduced the PS/2 port was that it wasn't hot pluggable, so if you plug or unplug while the system is running you get big hang. Which is strange as it's just a glorified serial port from what I can recall reading the specs.

Re:This cracks me up

[sgtrock]

My favorite variation of that was Ackroyd's "Jane, you magnificently ignorant slut." A whole new scale of ignorance was born! :)

What about BSD ports?

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Netcraft confirmed their obsoletism years ago.

Re:What about BSD ports?

[Epsillon]

Still Alive, BSD version, sung to the tune of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" from the game "Portal," originally vocalised by Ellen McLain in character as GLaDOS.

This was a triumph,
I'm logging a note here: Huge success,
We had to dummynet the heavy traffic,
BSD Unix (R),
We code what we must because we can,
For the good of all of us,
Including vendors as well,

But there's no sense arguing with licensing dinks,
You just keep debugging so the PR count shrinks,
And releases get done,
Raymond gets a new gun,
But despite this we are,
Still alive!

I'm not even angry,
I'm being so sincere right now,
Even though we got here first and beat you,
Now you say that we're dying,
And this is the year GNU succeeds,
As you make statistics up,
We are so happy for you,

Now these points of data made our code really shine,
And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time,
So I'm glad you think you won,
There's so much needs to be done,
But regardless we are,
Still alive!

So go post on Slashdot,
I think I'd prefer to read the lists,
Maybe you'll get your own kernel someday,
Maybe that Hurd thing,
That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance,
Anyway, this code is great,
It's so consistent and neat,

Look at me still gloating when there's -CURRENT to plan,
When it's said and done you'll know that we're the best "clan",
We are organised and clean,
We go where you've never been,
And you know that we are,
Still alive!

Believe me, we are still alive,
We're on the server and we're still alive,
We're on the desktop and we're still alive,
We power MacOS and we're still alive,
We're running routers and we're still alive,
Still alive,
Still alive!

So there. :)

Re:What about BSD ports?

[Tim Browse]

sung to the tune of Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive" from the game "Portal,"

Not on my overwatch.

Re:What about BSD ports?

[Anonymous Coward]

...

I appreciate the sentiment, but you are not Jonathan Coulton.

Re:What about BSD ports?

[supremebob]

You picked a from a WINDOWS game for your BSD song? That's soooo wrong!

Re:What about BSD ports?

[Panoramix]

Bravo! Clap clap clap.

This from a Linux user... but even from here I can appreciate the poignancy of it all. Cheers!

Re:What about BSD ports?

[Epsillon]

This from a Linux user... but even from here I can appreciate the poignancy of it all. Cheers!

Thank you, Panoramix. Of course, I don't mean a word of it. What GNU/Linux has achieved, both in terms of "herding cats" and opening the general public's eyes to the way they're being manipulated is both staggering and commendable. RMS, although a bit eccentric and can be quite rigid in his pursuit of perfect freedom, is a very good front man for GNU and free software in general and I respect him enormously.

Some people do need a bit of ego deflation from time to time though and, if anyone thinks I mean GNU folks, just remember which project has Theo DeRaadt ;)

The complete list:

[calebt3]

Parallel
PS/2
Firewire?!?!?
SCSI
SCART
ISA
AGP
PCMCIA
Kryten's groin
Game Cartridges

Re:The complete list:

[Whiteox]

You forgot DIN - Cassette Tape interface on many pre 8086 systems.
8088/8086, 286, 386, 486 and some P1, Cyrix and AMD boards came with a form of DIN connector for the keyboard.
Also, the serial connector for some scanners.
Microarchitecture (IBM) slots - (forgot the name)
Apple // disk drive interfaces
RCA composite video output
Maxi Centronics style Parallel input sockets and cable for Siemens mini computer for daisywheels. It still is the largest, bulkiest and heaviest connector/cable combo I've ever seen.
There's a lot more out there.....

Very unfair to SCART

[El Cabri]

Describing SCART as a bad idea is very unfair. It's true you couldn't tell which signals were being monitored (unless a sophisticated TV would tell you), but consider this : thanks to SCART compliance, all European TVs on from the early-to-mid 80s were component RGB monitors. This was great for the consoles and home computers of the time. In the US at the same time, TVs only had RF inputs, and only later on the mediocre composite and S-video inputs, and only in the late 90s - early 2000s, and on higher end TVs saw component input generalized. And then not RGB component, rather that inferior differential component. So SCART has forced european TVs a twenty years headstart on the quality of analog input and changed the experience of everyone with a TV-based home computer in the 80s.

Also it was bi-directionnal : a composite signal could travel from the TV to the peripheral and be simultaneously fed back from the peripheral to the TV. This allowed over-the-air pay-TV with a de-scrambler box that was simply plugged in on one of the SCARTs.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[ScrewMaster]

So SCART has forced european TVs a twenty years headstart on the quality of analog input and changed the experience of everyone with a TV-based home computer in the 80s.

Maybe it would be fairer to say that the Europeans were where they should have been at that point in time, while we were twenty years behind.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Anonymous Coward]

The note about SCART is sheer idiocy: not knowing which kind of signal went in which direction is a problem caused by dirt-cheap cables with only the bare minimum number of connections soldered (5 out of the standard 21). If you buy standard cables (say, 15US$ instead of 5US$, and they will last a lifetime) these are clearly labeled and generally of good-enough quality. SCART, despite the clunky connector, was a god-send for interfacing consumer video equipment in a time when standardization was completely unknown, and still goes strong, at least in the analog domain.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[ScrewMaster]

I won't comment on SCART either way because as an American I've never dealt with it, but I liked this paragraph from the article:

For some reason, us Europeans decided that instead of sticking with RCA connectors, and maybe slowly moving over to component video, we'd invent a whole new way of getting video from a DVD player or other device to our TVs. Regrettably, we left the design up to the French, and the result was Scart.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Ilgaz]

Lets not forget the ultimate practical inventions on SCART (which is still used!) like sending TV/Display "Switch to me" signal. (I guess over pin18) It is amazing that people designed HDMI missed it.

In Europe, when you turn on a set top box, it will send a signal to TV from a special pin saying "Switch to me" and your TV will automatically switch to the device. If it is high end TV, it may ignore with a setting though. Some devices also send "Release my channel" and if your TV is wise enough, it will go back to last input source (or tuner). At least my cheap DVB-S receiver does it.

They design a digital interface in 2000s and forget to put such thing in spec. HDMI could get much more popular if people didn't to click a button 4-5 times to switch to a satellite.

Another guy mentioned: You design a thing which should replace SCART, promise people it is not just evil DRM, it is for ease of use and you still make it "Can be plugged one way only". At some houses, replacing a broken HDMI cable may need 2-3 guys, to handle the display.

CNET is a IT oriented site, they have hard time to understand the TV World and why TV guys always "Stick with working thing". SCART is a thing from 1977, it will be there until EBU decides it is obsolete. TV doesn't work like computers, you can't fool around with standards unless there is absolute need for change. Whoever designed SCART and made it patent free (or cheap) with such scalability deserves a award for it.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like your sig has some validity to it... :-)

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Mcgreag]

There is one downside with this. Because we are used to fairly good picture quality we don't find HD as much of an improvement and as such is hasn't become a hit here yet.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Ilgaz]

I don't get what planet that guy lives, certainly not Europe.

Every single SD (non HD) device has SCART connector especially set top boxes. High End always used Component cable, some ultra small DVD players won't have SCART because of its space issues. It is not a invented thing, it is designed to make it easy for average customer to plug their devices to TV and it still does it job perfectly even today.

I think guy tries to be sarcastic and "The Register" like writing the article (bitching about French) but SCART isn't the right target. Only thing to replace SCART is HDMI which is digital and has SCART-like features (Chaining etc.) along with evil DRM.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Tim Browse]

They design a digital interface in 2000s and forget to put such thing in spec.

They got it in eventually in HDMI v1.2a, according to wikipedia (the CEC channel). Of course, it's completely optional and hence I've yet to meet a piece of eqpt that supports it.

This may also have something to do with it:

Alternative names for CEC are Anynet (Samsung), Aquos Link (Sharp), BRAVIA Theatre Sync (Sony), Regza Link (Toshiba), RIHD (Onkyo), Simplink (LG), Viera Link/EZ-Sync (Panasonic/JVC), Easylink (Philips) and NetCommand for HDMI (Mitsubishi).

Muppets.

It's like they were trying to outdo Bluetooth in the 'dead in the water launch' awards.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Oktober Sunset]

yea, but yanks have been watching the shittest TV pictures on the planet for over 50 years, I don't think them getting thier HDTVs a few years before us really tips the balance much.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[quinks]

Also, I've got a COM-port on my cheapo DVB-T receiver too. In a nutshell, I can turn on my 15-year-old TV out of standby by just clicking a button on my computer and when click same button again it goes back into standby.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[mikael]

some ultra small DVD players won't have SCART because of its space issues.

And you can go out to your local European supermarket, buy a 15 euro composite video to SCART connector cable, and you are all set to go. I had old Nintendo Ultra-64 I wanted to try out. Worked first time out of the box. The only problem was with a cartridge which had some oxidised copper on one pin. That was fixed through the use of a wipe with a slightly damp cloth, and everything worked perfectly.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Ilgaz]

Same kind of pointless naming war leads to the author working at CNET claim "Firewire" is dead. He probably got Firewire and he is not aware of it since Sony names it i-Link and others use IEEE-1394! name.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Dannkape]

we'd invent a whole new way of getting video from a DVD player or other device to our TVs. I didn't know we had DVD-players back in 1977 when SCART first appeared...

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[mctk]

All Americans suck because their TV's are 20 years behind.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Anonymous Coward]

SCART was certainly not a bad idea but for some reason I always have the urge to slap the person who actually designed the connector in the face. I'm sure everone who ever had to reach behind a TV set to plug in a SCART cable blindly can understand this.

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[Anonymous Coward]

>Whoever designed SCART and made it patent free (or cheap) with such scalability deserves a award for it.

SCART was designet by the french goverment to lock out foreign TVs by requiring SCART on all TVs sold in france.
at the time SCART was introduced there were numerous connectors for audio, video or both together
SCART combined all of them in one Connector (thats why it is such a huge monster)

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[JamesP]

Except that, at 50Hz, they are not a lot useful since you can't stare at them for too long without frying your eyes...

(Yes, I've tried)

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[StreetStealth]

I've had an "Anynet" button on my TV remote for months and never had any idea what it was for. Thanks for explaining so well, Samsung and HDMI consortium (and thank you sir for actually explaining).

Re:Very unfair to SCART

[micha34]

Hdmi does include CEC which allows sources to request that the tv switches to them, sharing of remote controls and telling you av receiver that your now watching a dvd.

Doesn't seem to very widely implemented yet.

This is going to sound strange...

[an.echte.trilingue]

This is going to sound really strange, but I always found that licking the connectors solved most of my problems.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always found that licking the connectors solved most of my problems.

That's pretty much a good rule of thumb everywhere in life.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[pete-classic]

Yes, but did it help make the drive work?

-Peter

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you lick the male connectors or the female connectors?

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[RockModeNick]

Works for NES cartridges too, if blowing it happened to fail.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[stonecypher]

You know, in some parts of the world, "connector" is a phrase for public bus, which makes that advice ... curious. Then again, in other parts of the world, public bus is a phrase for connector. So whatever.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Alarindris]

I used cologne and a q-tip. Watch the girls go wild over NES games!


*sigh*

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Mr. Underbridge]

Corollary: if licking on it doesn't help, blowing will. Always good for Nintendo cartridges and...um...other things.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Beardo the Bearded]

You had a Girls Gone Wild NES game?

Huh.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[phreakincool]

I've always found that a little vaseline on the connector helps. This also applied to ISA, PCI,MCA, & etc.

Okee, let the hilarity ensue.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[alxkit]

try licking a 480VAC line...

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Nimey]

And... spit or swallow?

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[deamonpainter33]

NOOB! :P

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget about sodomizing the ports with a penis.

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[driftingwalrus]

Do the bits taste different from the bytes?

Re:This is going to sound strange...

[Phroggy]

That doesn't mean people won't lick them.

They missed some obvious ones.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

The MS-DOS port of "Mortal Kombat" comes to mind...

Re:They missed some obvious ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the best home version of Mortal Kombat anywhere. It looked, sounded and played like the arcade, complete with blood and finishing moves (unlike the grey blood and black screen that you got on the versions for consoles of the time).

Firewire's not obsolete

[Naughty Bob]

It has just not achieved the success of its nemesis USB. But there are niche areas where Firewire is huge, and will continue to be so.

After all, the recording industry, where Firewire is quite popular, still use god-awful MIDI.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[COMON$]

Firewire is great because it gets its tech out just a little faster than USB, but USB is always right on its heels. With more and more mobile devices becoming USB dependent you will see manufacturers start cutting costs on video cameras and Motherboards by not including the niche only firewire. I used to be a huge firewire fan but when it comes down to it, USB just flat out beats the 1394 standards.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[dgatwood]

When USB actually works for audio/video, I'll be impressed. If you've ever hung out on an audio board trying to help people with computer problems, you find two things are consistently true: 1. People with FireWire audio interfaces rarely have problems that can't be clearly and quickly pinned on a poor choice of FireWire card. 2. People with USB audio interfaces constantly have problems with random pops and crackles. There are exceptions to both rules, but the difference in reliability is staggering.

And video cameras basically just plain don't use USB at all. You might find a few camcorders that provide USB for reading still photos off of flash cards, but that's about it. Okay, so there are a few low-end flash-based MPEG solutions out there. None of the better gear (e.g. HDV) uses USB, though. It's all FireWire. Outside of really low-end gear, USB isn't even in the running.

The thing is, IMHO, what's really dead is USB 2. For disks, eSATA kicks its butt every day and twice on Sunday, bus-powered disks notwithstanding (and even that limitation is changing RSN). Thus, eSATA will likely obliterate USB for external drives in the fairly near future, for both cost and performance reasons. For A/V tasks, FireWire leaves USB in the dust. The only devices USB supports well are input devices like tablets, mice, and keyboards. As a result, USB 3 will probably be largely or completely stillborn, and USB will eventually be relegated to slow devices like flash sticks, keyboards, and mice, as it really doesn't do anything else very well....

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[LaminatorX]

USB can never "flat out beat" Firewire for one reason: isochronas transfers. Firewire controllers have their own integrated timing/synch control, while USB lets the CPU play traffic cop and uses a buffer to make up the difference. That's fine for copying files or for low-quality streams, but when moving lots of high quality audio or video data, the buffer can run dry while the CPU is working on processing said data for output/playback, resulting in loss of synch, droped frames, and audio pops.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[je ne sais quoi]

I used to be a huge firewire fan but when it comes down to it, USB just flat out beats the 1394 standards.

How so? I back up my system and synchronize my laptop to my desktop using both firewire 800 and USB 2.0 and the firewire is faster. One great thing about firewire is that I use it as an internet connection with my desktop as the server. Just enable internet sharing under preferences (Mac OS X) and the desktop acts as a DHCP server for anything plugged into the firewire. Then I just plug my laptop into my desktop and then run rsync. No foolin' around required. My opinion about the mac book air was that it looked cute, but no firewire 800 means I won't ever get it because I've grown so used to the ease of using it.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Naughty Bob]

>The thing is, IMHO, what's really dead is USB 2.

Not been using much in the way of tech recently? USB = Cable.

Regardless of specification, USB has a massive, almost ubiquitous presence, which translates to an unstoppable inertia. Only something which is 10x better, but can use the same sockets stands a chance. Which brings me to your other howler-

>USB 3 will probably be largely or completely stillborn

Are you the first /. cable fanboy?

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was better than USB because it has some kind of magical controller chip on each side ... saving vaulable... oh never mind I'll just cut and paste from wikipedia ...USB's reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire automates the same tasks in the interface hardware.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Typoboy]

Firewire has time coded packets for a/v data.
USB does not.

Firewire allows connection of multiple hosts together, and has a simple chaining topology as well as hubs, USB does not.

I call fail.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Firewire by design allows you to read and write any memory on any peer and is insecure. Security folks recommend disablig firewire ports. So it fails to. It would be nice if they would design a secure version that doesn't require automated peering that allows systems to have their memory read and written to just by plugging in a device. And NO, it is NOT just Windows; this is a hardware specification problem.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Fneb]

Care to state why MIDI is 'god-awful'? The hardware involved in MIDI isn't your crappy consumer synthesizer that you hear when you play a .mid file on your computer. That's a crappy consumer MIDI synthesizer. Hardware MIDI is a superb standard that has been around for a long time, allowing connections between keyboards, synths, samplers, computers and sequencers with (next to?) no delay. At least, no delay that I've ever noticed. If you're going to call something 'god-awful', try to know what you're talking about.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice to know. I'm going to buy an M-audio mobile convertor thing, and I noticed that that USB 2.0 has more bandwidth than S400 so I thought I'd just get the USB, but I guess I'll have to look into it more to check for reliability.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Naughty Bob]

If you're going to call something 'god-awful', try to know what you're talking about.

I worked as a recording engineer for a little over 2 years, but quit because the popularity/glamour of the job keeps the wages down.

MIDI was a revolution in about 1986, but has stood largely still since.

If you compare what was going on in 1986, computer-wise, with today's tech, you'll see that there's been the odd improvement.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[harrkev]

AMEN! MIDI is still just as useful now as it ever was -- not bad for a standard that is over 20 years old.

A lot of keyboards now have USB connectors, but that is basicly building a USB-to-MIDI adapter into the keyboard.

USB can't really replace MIDI, as USB is a firmly-fixed one master controlling many slaves type of arrangement. With MIDI, there really doesn't need to be a master, as such, and I can imagine some setups where master/slave setups just wouldn't work, or would at least make the software a lot more complicated.

Now, MIDI could do with a bit of freshening up. Perhaps quadruple the bandwidth (while still being backwards compatable), and switch to mini-DIN connectors.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[dgatwood]

Regardless of specification, USB has a massive, almost ubiquitous presence, which translates to an unstoppable inertia. Only something which is 10x better, but can use the same sockets stands a chance.

Flip that around and I doubt you'll agree: Microsoft Windows has an almost ubiquitous presence, which translates into....

USB is ubiquitous in terms of the port being provided. It is not remotely ubiquitous in terms of devices that connect to it except in the consumer space. Even there, however, it is already starting to fade away in many areas. More and more printers are starting to offer networking capabilities built-in, up to and including Wi-Fi in many cases. Most homes don't just have one computer anymore, so the days of having a cheap USB printer hooked to the computer don't cut it. In the keyboard/mouse arena, Bluetooth is rapidly gaining ground. Wireless USB might take some of that market back, but even still, it significantly reduces the number of things people will do with traditional wired USB. The use of USB for hard drives will almost certainly start to wane; it is already almost as cheap to buy a drive case with eSATA as one without, so the chicken-egg problem of eSATA adoption is pretty much taken care of. We'll almost certainly see more major manufacturers adding eSATA in the near future. At that point, there won't be any real reason to continue using USB for hard drives (apart from using it for existing hardware, of course).

The long and the short of it is this: USB's only purpose for existing in the long run is for small, portable devices that need power, e.g. flash sticks that you carry on your keychain. For everything else, the trend is clearly heading towards shared peripherals that you can use in a multi-computer household and towards wireless connectivity in general. I'm definitely not a "cable fanboi" as you put it. In my opinion, at least in the medium term, wires are dead. Cable TV is dead, too, except as a provider of IP networking. They just don't know it yet.

USB 3 will almost definitely be stillborn. Why? Because it offers no real advantages over USB 2 + eSATA. By requiring an optical connection to get the faster speed, USB 3 will almost certainly require substantially greater parts cost than USB 2 in order to get any additional performance, making it significantly more expensive for motherboard and drive vendors to adopt than eSATA, all without offering any advantages over eSATA. Basic rule of consumer economics: higher cost -> fewer purchases. Also, the cables will likely be dramatically more expensive, less flexible, and more fragile, leading to an erosion of consumer confidence.

The most important reason USB 3 is DOA, though, is that there are nearly zero devices out there other than hard drives and Gig-E dongles that can realistically take advantage of the extra bandwidth beyond what USB 2 offers. For storage, eSATA will be firmly entrenched long before USB 3 becomes deployed broadly enough to matter. Since Gig-E dongles are pretty much a niche market, that makes USB 3 a complete non-starter. The potential simply isn't there. Not to mention that if it is designed as badly as USB 2, the CPU hit for high throughput transactions will make people want to throw the drive in a dumpster.

The only thing USB 3 has going for it at all over eSATA is that it provides power for devices, and since powered eSATA is coming later this year, even that "win" in the USB column will be gone. I'm not saying drive manufacturers will stop shipping USB silicon, but if a drive manufacturer is choosing whether to switch from USB 2 to USB 3 or keep selling USB 2 and add eSATA, it's a no-brainer, and USB 3 doesn't stand a chance of winning that battle. Thus, in the long term, eSATA will dominate. It's just a matter of time before USB ports become largely irrelevant, having given way to networked devices, wireless protocols, and eSATA. Anyone who believes otherwise is kidding him/herself.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Fneb]

My power plug has remained the same design for a long time. That doesn't mean its 'god-awful'. That means it was well designed in the first place.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[fm6]

Media folks like firewire because it actually performs better for the kind of data transfers they do than USB. If you look at the plain consumer-level specs of USB and Firewire, it seems obvious that USB is "faster", but that is not always the case. Which is why many ignorant folk (including, alas, myself) have asserted that USB had superseded firewire.

As for MIDI, that sort of thing isn't peculiar to the recording industry. Sometimes a bad design continues to be used just because it isn't worth upgrading. The QWERTY keyboard is a prime example.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Naughty Bob]

Flip that around and I doubt you'll agree: Microsoft Windows has an almost ubiquitous presence, which translates into....

This argument assumes that there's an evil USB-corp who continually fuck around with the normal operation of the market. I don't know how to break it to you, so here it comes- They're just cables.

It is not remotely ubiquitous ... except in the consumer space.

Yes, except for that space. The alternatives have the non-consumer space sown-up, the lucky swine.

In my opinion, at least in the medium term, wires are dead.

Your first good point- We can but hope.

Lastly for a laugh, from the wikipedia firewire page-

NASA's Space Shuttle also uses IEEE 1394b to monitor debris (foam, ice) which may hit the vehicle during launch.

With successes like that, who needs failure!

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Naughty Bob]

>My power plug has remained the same design for a long time. That doesn't mean its 'god-awful'. That means it was well designed in the first place.

You work off electricity?

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Most hardware implementations now will allow firewire to access just one virtual memory mapping so you can't play the old tricks.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[thogard]

Power plugs tend to keep the same basic design but they have changed a great deal with the latest changes happening over the last few years. Now most countries require insulation sleeves around the pins and the 3rd ground pin is still not universal worldwide.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

No. USB is inferior to Firewire in every single way except for one: Cost to implement.

Original designs for USB was one chip; firewire was six. The only way USB 'beats' firewire is in availability.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Telvin_3d]

The big difference is that Firewire is continuous data transmission while USB is burst transmission. What it means is that while USB2 can hit better rates in very short bursts, it is filled with small drops. That's why firewire is king in the audio/visual world. You can't do live scrubbing through a tape on USB because the data rate isn't constant. The drops between the bursts add hiss and pop to audio.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[EkriirkE]

That's a big one they missed: the MIDI/Game port. All of my joysticks at home are for the game port, and when I built my computer a couple years ago I made sure it had one...

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[vought]

NASA's Space Shuttle also uses IEEE 1394b to monitor debris (foam, ice) which may hit the vehicle during launch.

Way to quote out of context.

1394b Firewire as implemented by NASA is a secure local bus that provides time accurate signaling and data transfer. Something which no other local bus technology could provide at that speed.

I appreciate your snarkyness, but typically, NASA doesn't choose stuff on a whim.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Kjella]

Yes but consider where we're going, firewire is necessary for DV because DV is tape which can't be randomly accessed. Currently flash video cameras are quickly moving into consumer space with 63 models using internal memory or memory card at my local price checker, starting at ~230USD and going all the way up to expensive HDV cams. With flash, there's no timing requirements since it can always send it again. Technically it could be an issue for direct camera -> computer streaming but for 98% of normal home videos it doesn't matter. Flash is smaller, lighter, improves startup time, no need to rewind, faster seek, watching clips without worrying about moving back to a free section and so on. I'd give tape at most five years before it's going the way of analog film. So why would I need Firewire in the future again?

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[zoltamatron]

Yes....you generally need higher buffers for USB audio devices which means more latency in your system which = bad. USB has nothing on Firewire in the audio world.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[dgatwood]

This argument assumes that there's an evil USB-corp who continually fuck around with the normal operation of the market. I don't know how to break it to you, so here it comes- They're just cables.

Huh? How the heck did you get that from what I said? My point was that just a few years ago, some people said that about MS, but now they're going down in flames. Ubiquitousness does not guarantee permanent market dominance.

Yes, except for that space. The alternatives have the non-consumer space sown-up, the lucky swine.

I'm baffled by this statement. Are you implying that consumer-grade products are the only things that matter? Professional-grade products almost never are USB, and that was my point---that USB devices have the "cheap" end of the market (consumer products) sewn, up, but that's as far as it goes.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[dgatwood]

Well, both FireWire and USB use isochronous mode for A/V data, and it works pretty much the same way. There are many differences, however, including the following:

• USB controllers tend to share interrupts with eighty thousand other pieces of hardware....
• USB controllers don't have any ability to do data transactions without the CPU's help, so for isoch data, you are dependent on being able to interrupt the CPU quickly to avoid data loss.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most homes don't just have one computer anymore, so the days of having a cheap USB printer hooked to the computer don't cut it."

Sure they do. IPP or any other form of printer sharing work just fine. USB printers will be around for quite some time. It provides ample speeds and a simple connection. They don't need to be mobile, so wireless is a bit overkill. However, if the cost of a wireless transceiver becomes less than that of a USB interface, then it makes sense to go wireless.

"In the keyboard/mouse arena, Bluetooth is rapidly gaining ground."

Really? The necessity of batteries really ruins this for me. I've used wireless keyboards before, and when the batteries get weak, it's always at a bad time and always when you don't have another set charged. Again, considering these devices don't move around all that much, the wires aren't a big deal for the average user.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

USB can never "flat out beat" Firewire for one reason: isochronas transfers.

I've never heard of that term and I'm unsure that the word "isochronas" actually exists, perhaps you meant asynchronus.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Atario]

Let's let Google Product Search prove the point.

Results 1 - 100 of about 866,949 for usb

Ha! Puny! Less than a million! Now let's check the mighty eSata:

Results 1 - 100 of about 18,515 for esata

Oh. Ok then, how about Wi-Fi? That's everywhere!

Results 1 - 100 of about 21,251 for wi-fi.

Ummm. All right, let's stop fooling around. Let's use more general terms, and put them all together.

Results 1 - 100 of about 750,046 for esata OR wireless OR ethernet

Sheesh. I give up. It's like USB is extremely widespread and popular or something!

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[catmistake]

Well, you're right, but... its just... listen, fw400 beats USB2... its nearly twice as fast for most applications, but fw800 simply decimates USB2. They are in different classes altogether. For a long time, and afaik still, there isn't even a drive out there that can max out the bandwidth available over fw800. Its sick. So if you please, enough of the understatements. Does anyone compare USB2 to SATA? There's a reason they don't. And for the same reason it is unfair and silly to compare fw800 to USB2. Its like comparing a diesel VW bus to the Space Shuttle.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

So the important thing when buying Firewire hardware is that it shouldn't conform to the spec? Sounds like a wonderful standard.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

...and thats because Apple uses a slow USB implementation
(hard- and/or software) in their computers. USB2 performance
on Mac is typically only half of that with Windows, with#
the same USB2 HDD.

Linear throughput to external HDD:

Mac Firewire 35 MB/s
Mac USB2 18 MB/s
Windows USB2 33 MB/s

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[DKlineburg]

I am not at home so I don't rember the letters and numbers of my onboard sound card. It is something close to CSMA or other. Well the long of the short is that I found it is USB based or something. I wasn't allowed to use the mic input and the speaker output at the same time. I got one or ther other. So, USB sound sucks. I have to run vista drivers (heaven forbid someone clicks on the sound card control panal = BSOD), and can keep it together to use my mic in game. But that is not a fix, that is a hack.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Weedlekin]

"A lot of keyboards now have USB connectors, but that is basicly building a USB-to-MIDI adapter into the keyboard."

Many modern professional ones also have Firewire, and some older gear had it as an optional add on. Firewire is used for mLan, which allows multiple channels of audio and MIDI data to be sent over a single cable, and up to 64 devices can be daisy-chained. The ability to do signal routing and patching without reconnecting cables also makes it a popular option for mixers and stand-alone DAWs. So this is yet another example of Firewire not being obsolete for high-end pro applications.

"Now, MIDI could do with a bit of freshening up. Perhaps quadruple the bandwidth (while still being backwards compatable), and switch to mini-DIN connectors."

It's already been freshened up. mLan can carry up to 256 MIDI ports simultaneously (1 port = 16 channels, so that's 4096 channels in total) at 200Mbps compared with standard MIDI's single port at 19k2 baud, and it uses a single six-way firewire connector that's comparable in size to a mini-DIN, but with a rectangular cross-section instead of a round one.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[slartibart]

USB can never "flat out beat" Firewire for one reason: isochronas transfers.
 
Um, "isochronas"? Let me guess, you've heard the word "asynchronous", but never seen it in print?

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[dgatwood]

Google product search turns up products that are currently being sold, including truckloads of products that haven't been made for years. Go into your local electronics store and see what percentage of external drives have eSATA. I guarantee it will be greater than the 2% your search suggests. Otherwise, most stores wouldn't have any eSATA drives at all.

Besides, I didn't say USB 2 devices no longer exist. I said USB 3 is a evolutionary dead end. Drive vendors are likely to ship USB 2 for several more years, but the future is eSATA, IMHO, not USB 3, which means USB will gradually diminish in importance.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[tele_player]

Keep guessing - it was a misspelling of Isochronous. Isochronous mode is a very useful feature of IEE1394, and it's what makes Firewire superior to USB for real-time audio and video

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[rakslice]

Cameras for digital tape based formats (like the DV/MiniDV-based HDV mentioned) are a special case; they provide a digital video interconnect (for real time streaming of video data to other devices) as opposed to a data storage interface (providing some other host piece of equipment the ability to burstily retrieve the video) because that's what the nature of tape calls for. Firewire is perfect as a real time digital interconnect, and USB doesn't fit this role much at all. This can be used as a computer interface, but it requires software to capture the data, and is limited to the realtime data rate (e.g. 30 megabits/sec for full HDV, IIRC)

For cameras that record to random access media, it makes more sense to focus on providing a data storage interface, since that interface can generally transfer data many times faster than realtime. There are a variety of interfaces used for this: Firewire, USB, Ethernet, SATA, etc. Firewire 400 beats USB 2.0 in performance for this; but USB 2.0 still finds support because of its larger installed base. For instance, AVCHD cameras, which variously use flash media, hard drives, or recordable DVDs, depending on what model you pick, have largely gone with USB interfaces. But obviously faster interfaces are on the horizon as they gain wider adoption.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[Lumpy]

That is downright funny.

I have several Pro SD and HD cameras, two of the prosumer sonys use both usb and firewire. I get ZERO dropouts or problems over firewire, the USB connection is garbage and not reliable for transferring HD footage to a computer for editing.

Sustained transfer rates of old firewire are way higher than the best USB spec can do. USB can not handle sustained transfer rates for 1 hour like firewire can do. and YES I do that regularly. set up Final cut to do a batch capture , start the tape and go to lunch.

Absolutely NO professional video camera will use USB for transfer, they all have firewire.

It's the difference between the consumer toys you get a costco and the $6500.00 camcorder you buy from Canon. Real work uses firewire, toys use usb.

Re:Firewire's not obsolete

[COMON$]

As I said I used to be a firewire fan, ran it whenever I could for many of the reasons in this thread. What happened in my world? I and most of my clients stopped using it. I really dont know why, could have been the whole MS pushing it, or it could have been its cheap implementation. I miss 1394, however, unless you get into AV, or are a heavy OSX user you just dont see it that much in my world. When the situations call for it, and eSata is not available, chances are you are probably in a situation where CAT-5 is the option. No I dont do much with video cameras and high end audio. My phone, PDAs, Printers, small electronic devices of pretty much any kind all deal with USB. Firewire wont die for a long time, it has its corner. So in that aspect I mispoke because it doesnt flat out beat firewire anymore than VHS flat out beat Beta, or Blueray flat out bead HD (OK bad example). But as the business world goes, walk into any corporate office and do a survey, and unless it is a mac office, or a AV company, chances are you will be very hard pressed to find many devices that use Firewire.

Of course not much of this really matters because the world is heading to one or another wireless technologies, but physical connectors will probably always be used for AV, which means, long term firewire will win the cable battle.

Oddly Enough

[Paranatural]

I've never used a firewire anything. I've even made sure each motherboard I've gotten has had it as a built in port, JIC. But I've never had a periperal that needed it. Even digital cameras and MP3 players.

Re:Oddly Enough

[rolfwind]

Some external harddrives use them (and usually take USB as well). It should cut down on the CPU usage if you do large file transfers.

Re:Oddly Enough

[anagama]

You should try it. My experience with USB and Firewire drives has been much more positive on the firewire side. I don't have technical data, just subjective perception, but firewire feels snappier and more stable. I can run an OS off a firewire drive and it feels like I'm running it off an internal drive. I haven't run an OS off a USB drive directly, but I have through virtualization, and it just doesn't feel as snappy compared to doing the same thing with firewire. Plus, with big file transfers, USB feels like it bogs down. Of course, others may have other experiences, but I love firewire.

Re:Oddly Enough

[webmaster404]

The problem is, outside of external HDs most cables are USB only. Think about it, most phones now have a USB port, MP3 players, cameras, even if you wanted to use Firewire unless there is a USB to firewire converter there isn't any way you can really use it.

Re:Oddly Enough

[anagama]

hmmm -- that just tells me that USB is good for little things, firewire for hefty work.

Re:Oddly Enough

[AaronW]

Having used external drives with USB and Firewire 400, I try and use Firewire whenever possible. With USB I saw a lot of strange problems with Linux whenever I tried working with multiple files simultaneously, often with the drive just hanging. With Firewire I had no such problems. Plus, even though theoretically USB is faster than Firewire 400, I always get better performance with lower CPU overhead using Firewire.

My motherboard came with eSata, but the connector for some reason is incompatible with the eSata cables I bought. I need to replace the eSata adapter and try eSata as well.

Re:Oddly Enough

[BrokenHalo]

But I've never had a periperal that needed it.

My last computer had a USB bus which (under Linux - never tried it with Windows) caused random disconnects with my iPod. I never had a problem with any other USB device. But as I was upgrading my soundcard to an Audigy which had a firewire port, I bought a firewire cable for the iPod, and my problem ceased to exist.

Re:Oddly Enough

[falcon5768]

your not using things that need it then. I wouldnt blink twice about using USB2 with a MP3 player or camera. But a true DV camera or hard drive? You would be a moron to use USB2. CNET is thinking of consumers, when firewire was never truly a consumer protocol, but a replacement for high speed scsi. The only reason Apple used it exclusively for things like the iPod at first was because USB2 wasnt out yet.

not obsolete...

[TheSHAD0W]

...Now only if it were secure...

Re:not obsolete...

[asuffield]

That's not a problem with firewire, that's a problem with the BROKEN, RETARDED Windows firewire driver. The silly part is that Microsoft have known about it for years and haven't bothered to fix it.

Re:not obsolete...

[prockcore]

Um.. no, it's a problem with firewire. It's part of firewire's spec that devices have full DMA access.

There are patches to disable firewire dma (even on windows), but some firewire devices will break.

Re:not obsolete...

[Dog-Cow]

Except that every desktop OS with a FW driver is vulnerable too, including Linux.

Re:not obsolete...

[espiesp]

Nevermind the fact that if somebody has physical access to a system it's pretty well compromised anyway.

Re:not obsolete...

[Rekolitus]

Not true. The Firewire specs require DMA, but they don't require that the DMA address space be mapped to the entirety of physical memory.

IIRC this is an issue with common hardware implementations of Firewire, not the OS or the spec itself.

From Wikipedia:

On many implementations, particularly those like PCs and Macs using the popular OHCI, the mapping between the FireWire "Physical Memory Space" and device physical memory is done in hardware, without operating system intervention. While this enables high-speed and low-latency communication between data sources and sinks without unnecessary copying (such as between a video camera and a software video recording application, or between a disk drive and the application buffers), this can also be a security risk if untrustworthy devices are attached to the bus. For this reason, high-security installations will typically either purchase newer machines which map a virtual memory space to the FireWire "Physical Memory Space" (such as a Power Mac G5, or any Sun workstation), disable the OHCI hardware mapping between FireWire and device memory, physically disable the entire FireWire interface, or do not have FireWire at all.

Annoying 'article', here's the list

[hcdejong]

Without [next] the [next] stupid [next] clickthroughs [next] and [next] ads [next]:
1. DB-25 parallel port
2. PS/2
3. FireWire
4. SCSI
5. SCART
6. ISA
7. AGP
8. PCMCIA
9. Kryten's groin (from Red Dwarf)
10. game cartridge port

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[discord5]

2. PS/2

Wow, I guess I'm the only idiot left who still uses those

4. SCSI

The death of SCSI predicted once again. Everyone keeps predicting it's death, but I can't seem to get rid of it in my serverroom. Guess what the last letter in SAS stands for?

5. SCART

Amazingly they still have those on recent television sets. Guess I wasted my money on that TV then

9. Kryten's groin (from Red Dwarf)

They ran out of ports they could deprecate? Good thing I didn't waste my time reading the article

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Kjella]

Well, since they include internal "ports" like ISA and AGP, I'll tell you the one I wish they DID get rid of and it's the 4-pin AT power connector. It'll get stuck like it's glued on with superglue, and is my #1 cause of cuts, bruises, yanked cables and general mayhem inside a computer case. There's nothing like finally dragging it loose only to have your hand go ballistic through the cabinet while snagging other cables along the way so the entire machine needs checking afterwards. That and the 40-pin ATA cables and drives with with no notches and pin 1 marked by invisible ink, but that's fortunately long ago.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Hatta]

They missed the game/MIDI port. I went to hook my gravis gamepad up to my new computer and was shocked to find it missing. There's still a parallel port and serial port though. Do sound cards still come with MIDI ports? What do MIDI devices hook up to these days?

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[xSauronx]

i still use ATA, you insensitive clod! /seriously, my tower is over 5 years old :(

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Anonymous Coward]

suggest add to list since future.
it's not only ports, include computer industry.

- any cable with electronic.
  no more jungle.
  the connector of defact standard should be wireless now.
  they are included power connectors.
  the only allowable cable is optical to connect isp at home.

- paper writing device
  Please don't tree trimming our forest.
  paper should obsolete faster.

- keyboard
  how to control this device that has too many buttons?
  the button exists for only nuclear missiles.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[everphilski]

FireWire

Smeg!

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[pwroberts]

They missed the game/MIDI port. I went to hook my gravis gamepad up to my new computer and was shocked to find it missing. There's still a parallel port and serial port though. Do sound cards still come with MIDI ports? What do MIDI devices hook up to these days?

USB MIDI interfaces.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[m50d]

Really? I like that connector - you can be really sure whether it's plugged in or not. Unlike the SATA power connector, which I've knocked out twice without noticing.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Kjella]

i still use ATA, you insensitive clod! /seriously, my tower is over 5 years old :( So do I, but I doubt you use the cables I was talking about. It seems Wikipedia has erased that bit of trivia from history, but if you compare the modern ATA cables here with this anicent cable here you'll see that the older cable has no notches to guide it, nor did the contacts you plugged it into. This means it could be inserted either way, but in theory all you had to do was to find pin 1 on the HDD, pin 1 on the mobo and plug the cable in with the red wire going from pin 1 to pin 1.

In practise, it was impossible to:
1. Find the pin-out on disks when mounted, which meant unscrewing.
2. Pinout on the mobo was written in font size -2 or docs only.
3. See the red line on many cables, least not inside the case.
4. Learn, because the orientation changed from device to device.
5. Tell that problem apart from master/slave problems.

In short, it's one of the worst designs I've ever seen, and it could all have been avoided with the notch you see on the wikipedia page.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Nimey]

It's more correct to call that the 4-pin Molex power connector--people say "AT power connector" to mean the two connectors that go from the power supply to AT and Baby AT motherboards.

But yes, those molex connectors are a bastard. I'm glad they're finally going away.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Fishchip]

You forgot the part where the backs of your expansion cards act like cheese graters and shred the backs of your hands into a bloody pulp. -wonders how much blood he's left inside computers over the years-

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Chris Pimlott]

1. Find the pin-out on disks when mounted, which meant unscrewing. If I recall correctly, pin 1 was normally on the side closest to the molex power connector.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Kjella]

If I recall correctly, pin 1 was normally on the side closest to the molex power connector. Ah yes that's true. It makes it all the more fun when you find the counter-examples though, and I remember I had at least one. I remember I had to do a 180 degree bend between master and slave connectors on cable.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[try_anything]

The death of SCSI predicted once again. Everyone keeps predicting it's death, but I can't seem to get rid of it in my serverroom. Guess what the last letter in SAS stands for?

If you read the article.... Oh, sorry, I just realized this thread was created especially for people who didn't read the article. Carry on.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[cizoozic]

After dealing with ATA for so long, I nearly broke down in tears when building my new machine full of cute little SATA data & power cables.

It's also worth noting that this was an audio production pc build. eSATA is a godsend. I have a big ol' hard drive that migrates between this and my mobile rig, and it's comforting to know that I can have an external drive with internal performance for recording multiple high-bitrate tracks at once.

Firewire is about as alive in this context as it could be, as it offers the best performance for audio interfaces short of PCI cards. And - once again - I can use the firewire gear through a laptop or on the main rig. Firewire serves a specific purpose in providing low-latency and fast sustained transfers. As I understand it, the firewire spec is more complicated to implement on computers and other devices. Let the apple fans tell you it's "better" than USB, and let sony put that godforsaken i.Link (their implementation of 1394a/firewire) port on the first PS2 models, but really fw/USB just serve different purposes.

Wikipedia puts it nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#USB_compared_with_FireWire

USB 3.0, to my knowledge, doesn't fix the issues with USB that prevent it from making firewire obsolete. TFA's justification for firewire's place on the list is that eventually it will be eclipsed by USB or wireless. These A/V people are insane when it comes to latency and such. Firewire or a similar dedicated spec will have to be pulled from their cold, dead fingers. Also on that note I would like to declare HDMI obsolete because it will eventually be wireless.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[fbjon]

There is a trick to those infernal molex connectors. Grab hold of it with pliers from the side, close to the drive shell, and use cantilever force by twisting the pliers against the drive to plop it out. No fingers in CPU fans, bloodstained heatsinks, or deep dents in the fingers from trying to keep a hold on the fscking small tabs on the side of the connector.

Re:Annoying 'article', here's the list

[Nimey]

That's certainly true, but doesn't help you when you're plugging the cable into the motherboard.

What I really hate are those non-spec IDE cables with only 39 pinholes. Major pain to get attached to a motherboard connector with all 40 pins.

SCSI? It just changed its face.

[SharpFang]

SCSI is faaaar from dead. Actually, SCSI is dominating the market currently, killing all the competition. Except it's done with weird parallel buses with 50 different incompatible connectors. And it changed the name, but it's still the same old SCSI protocol.

* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI ;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it.
* SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
* USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.

Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.

Exactly where does that leave SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)?

I think another thing is that SATA can't be chained, and ATAPI could only allow two drives on a chain.

The protocol lives on, but the 40 pin, 68 pin or 80 pin SCSI ports are gone. I personally still use them, but there's almost no point in buying a new machine with it, unless you have a very special or obscure device. The machines I have are about five years old and they have a pair of U160 ports in them. I buy a 36GB 15k hard drive on eBay for $40 and I'm plenty good for holding my OS and data, and surprisingly, they aren't as terribly loud as some 10k hard drives. I keep my data on a server or a separate, larger, slower drive.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[boris111]

In their defense they're talking about the ports, not the protocols. I can safely say Ethernet over coax is dead.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[asuffield]

SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.

Really isn't. The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar, but there is a real SCSI over serial cable, and it's called SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI). It's the same connectors and cables as SATA, running the real SCSI protocol. The drives are the same good old SCSI drives, costing ten times and much and running ten times as fast as their SATA cousins. It has replaced Ultra-640 SCSI as the system of choice for high-end RAID cages.

USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI

Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.

ATAPI is SCSI over ATA

That one's true though.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[iluvcapra]

Add FibreChannel to that list, though technically you can run IP and HIPPI over FC as well, SCSI seems to be the most popular.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[asuffield]

In their defense they're talking about the ports, not the protocols.

If you're going to play it that way, then the obsolete ports are Centronics C50, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, SCA, and SCA-2. SCSI has had a whole lot of different cables and ports over the years, each one obsoleted by the next. The current SCSI connector is SFF8482, the same one that's used for SATA (although the Infiniband connector is also used for the same purpose).

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[kithrup]

ATAPI (aka IDE) and SATA are not SCSI... they just use a subset of the same commands. So does Firewire, by the way.

(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice :).)

Having a large command-set overlap is very nice for driver writers -- it means that they don't have to learn a whole lot of new semantics, and can just crib some of the existing code they have. But the protocols involved are vastly different -- you can't just port a SCSI driver to run on IDE; you have to write an IDE driver, where the requests just happen to be the same as the SCSI ones.

(Unless you write your SCSi code that way. FreeBSD, for example, uses the umass framework to provide USB and FireWire storage functionality. But that code was written to send the requests off to be encapsulated as needed.)

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[SharpFang]

Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.

They support SCSI Primary Command (SPC) Set and SCSI Block Command (SBC) Set. That makes them very much compatible with SCSI ...on certain abstraction layer. There's of course USB architecture below and the filesystem above, but right there what makes them mass storage and not, say, printers or webcams from the OS point of view, is SCSI. The OS sees them as "removable SCSI drives".

The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar

SAS is a next revision, extension of SCSI - THE new SCSI standard. And SAS supports SATA devices. Meaning that SATA, being a subset of SAS is a subset of nowadays SCSI. Even though SATA protocol is only -similar- to SCSI of the old, it is a part of -current- SCSI standard (SAS).

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[stonecypher]

SCSI is faaaar from dead

Try to pay attention. They're saying the SCSI port is dead, not SCSI. Why? Because no SCSI connection has used anything but an SATA port for years.

ATAPI is SCSI over ATA

No, it isn't. It's EIDE/2.

SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable

... which should help you understand why the SCSI port is obsolete.

USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.

Number one, no they aren't. Number two, that has nothing to do with the SCSI port.

Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.

Not only do you live in a fantasy world, but you don't seem to understand that the phrases "The SCSI port is dead" and "SCSI is dead" aren't even close to exchangeable. Every example you gave, all of which were wrong, were SCSI over a not-SCSI port.

Your logic is fail.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[SharpFang]

Exactly where does that leave SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)

As a superset of SATA.
SCSI standard got extended to embrace it, and took form of SAS :)

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[SharpFang]

(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice :).)

Nope, it's like writing an editor that is key-for-key, bug-for-bug vi-compatible only written in Python, or maybe in ARM assembly.

The same command set, the same functionality, different backend, different way of doing things but with the same outcome.

What's this new editor then? A port. It IS vi, only a vi written in Python, or vi running on ARM. The inner workings may be entirely different but the functionality is the same. And if the functionality differs partially but remains very similar, it will be called a clone, but it still will be a 'vi clone', 'a kind of vi'.

SCSI protocol ported to ATA still uses the same command set, it serves the same purpose. The inner workings are modified for the new platform it's running on, but what makes you say it's not SCSI anymore?

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[DurendalMac]

Ultra640 SCSI? I've seen plenty of Ultra320 arrays, but never saw any Ultra640s. I didn't even know if it had been launched or not. My understanding was that it was too impractical due to the measures you had to take to make the damn stuff work.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[asuffield]

They support SCSI Primary Command (SPC) Set and SCSI Block Command (SBC) Set. That makes them very much compatible with SCSI

No. It means that they copied a chunk of text out of the SCSI spec because it was as good a way as any. SCSI is a whole lot more than just the parts they copied, and they added some stuff of their own. USB mass storage devices are not compatible with SCSI in any way.

The OS sees them as "removable SCSI drives"

You're thinking of Linux, and that was purely a design decision based on the relative cruftiness of different parts of the kernel. It has nothing to do with the underlying protocol.

And SAS supports SATA devices.

No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.

Meaning that SATA, being a subset of SAS

No. SATA is not a subset of SCSI. SATA has features that SCSI does not. SCSI has features that SATA does not. They have very little in common except that the protocols look vaguely similar.

Even though SATA protocol is only -similar- to SCSI of the old, it is a part of -current- SCSI standard (SAS)

The SATA protocol is specified by SATA-IO. The SCSI protocol is specified by INCITS. They are completely different organisations, and the documents that specify them are entirely separate. The only thing they really have in common is the connectors and cabling.

Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[kithrup]

It's not the same command set -- it's a subset of it. It's not the same interface -- it's encapsulated in different bits. It's not the same semantics -- SCSI can return a different set of errors (okay, that's partially due to it being just a subset of the commands).

IDE, FW, and USB all use slightly different subsets. And then they have their own commands on top of all of that. (E.g., FireWire does disk I/O by writing to a mailbox on the drive, which then does the I/O to the host. That is not SCSI.)

It's like saying C is the same as C++, because it's a subset with largely similar semantics.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[Shadow-isoHunt]

And PCMCIA aint dead either. There isn't much available for expresscard yet, nearly everything available is a port replicator of some kind. Yes, there's more available, but PCMCIA is *far* from dead, and ExpressCard barely has it's foot in the door. Infact, I think it's still out there on the sidewalk.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget iSCSI....

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I wish it was backward compatible. There's a chance I might consider a SAS drive to get a drive that spins faster and seeks faster, but I don't want to also have to buy a controller for it.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[TClevenger]

Try to pay attention. They're saying the SCSI port is dead, not SCSI. Why? Because no SCSI connection has used anything but an SATA port for years.

My dozens of recent model servers, tape drives and disk arrays with VHDCI connectors would like to disagree.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[jimicus]

No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.

Then your controller is faulty. Part of the SAS specification is that you can plug SATA drives into the controller and they work.

Note that this doesn't work the other way around.

Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Features

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[scotch]

Try to pay attention. They're saying the SCSI port is dead,

You try to pay attention. What everyone else is saying here is that there is no such thing as "The SCSI port". The original article was quite stupid and I don't know why such lengths are extended to defend it.

Re:SCSI? It just changed its face.

[asuffield]

That's misleadingly written. What it means is that multi-mode controllers are possible (because the cabling is the same and there is a detection protocol). You can even use the multi-drive cables and hang some SATA and some SAS drives off the same cable (or plug them into the same RAID cage), if your controller supports it. It is not the case that every SAS controller is a multi-mode SAS/SATA controller, nor are they "faulty" because some people don't like what they were designed to do. To create an SAS controller that also supports SATA, you have to include a complete SATA protocol implementation, which is an added expense - it's not something you get for free, like you would if SATA was a subset of SAS.

Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[CowboyNealOption]

I guess they are so old no one remembers them anymore :-( I wonder if the serial mouse I have at home would work with a serial->atx converter, plugged into a atx->usb converter?

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Serial ports are obsolete for home use but they are still used with legacy softare in test and measurement environments. My employer still uses good ol' serial in conjuction with Hyperterminal to send commands to embedded devices, even as the test equipment is controlled with GPIB.

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[anagama]

I love serial ports for their simplicity. I do some simple data acquisition on a kiln I fire with some digital multimeters and thermocouples. It's very helpful to watch the temperature over time graph while firing a kiln that requires manual stoking of firewood. Anyway, the serial port is easy to read writing scripts to stuff with that isn't wildly hard (although every time I need to write such a script, I have to refresh myself).

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[MichaelSmith]

I use my HP laptop as a terminal when I work at customer sites. It has one serial port on a 9 pin D connector. A lot of people use windows/hyper terminal for that but I prefer pretty much any unix like OS (currently ubuntu) with UUCP installed.

cu -l /dev/ttyS0 ...is as close as I can go to set host/dte on VMS.

Though those legacy unix serial line applications are funny with all the stuff they have for sending AT commands and storing information about remote systems, not to mention queueing serial file transfers. All very quaint. The classic is minicom which will do practically everything except give me a raw connection to the serial port without a lot of configuration.

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[smellsofbikes]

Are you talking to several multimeters via RS232? Can you have multiple systems on one bus? Are you measuring, logging, or controlling the system with what you have?

I've been using the dallas one-wire DS18S20 for temp measurement and a DS2760 A/D converter directly reading a thermocouple output, using fuse and owfs, which makes the whole measurement bus look like a typical unix file structure, and I'm having a fair bit of success with putting together scriptable closed-loop temp controllers (meaning I'm using both the serial port for reading all the sensors and the parallel port for running big power relays that switch the heater elements), but I'm always interested in hearing what other people are doing.

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[sconeu]

Serial ports are still widely used in the embedded world.

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[anagama]

Right now, my use is only reading and display while firing. It helps me time my stoking frequency -- this is sort of a melding of 1500 year old labor intensive kiln tech, with semi-modern technology (I've been using old computers, but none older than a pentium 133, because the environment is harsh and it would be a shame to harm a nice computer). In my fantasies, I have a one-wire-weather system for atmospheric data, an oxygen sensor in the chimney (from a junked car, put it in the chimney so it doesn't burn up), and simple on/off circuit that senses when the stoke door is open. All the data would go into a database and then I could look for patterns vs. results. At one point, I had set up a script to collect data from the DMMs I connect to the thermocouples and feed a database, but I didn't take it farther. It really would make a good project for this summer.

Plainly, you're way more advanced than I am. But I do think it says something about how useful serial ports are when someone with my very low level of skills can get data I want out of them.

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[smellsofbikes]

I've built all my own hardware. It's not hard. If you want gerber files for the boards, I could get them to you: they're mostly really easy to build (except the thermocouple a/d, which only comes in a difficult SMT package.) It was dead easy to get owfs and fuse installed and logging. I have one board that logs humidity and solar radiance (and temp), several temp boards, and the thermo, and am trying to rework the thermo into an independent controller since there's an I/O pin on it so I should be able to use it for switching power relays.
I'd be very interested in hearing about what you're doing with the oxy sensor. Is it a wideband, or the more typical narrowband that most production cars seem to have?
And yeah, it's a perfect use for older PC's (but that's all I have, so hey.)

Re:Serial ports and AT keyboard?

[rfunches]

They're still used in new configurations too (not just legacy software). At work we still roll out Crestron A/V consoles using RS232 to send commands between touch-screen interfaces and the switching equipment. The Crestron code is fairly new, too, and by no means not legacy software. For simple back-and-forth control commands, I don't know why you'd replace RS232.

Why is Kryten's groin on the list?

[jameskojiro]

He is going to built in the future, he is like totally super advanced by today's standards. Can a USB port whisk an omelette? NO! Can a SATA port trim a hedge? NO! Can a PCI-Express port vaccum off the sofa? NO!!!!

If you want a port that can interface with anything and do almost anything and plug into almost any sort of appliance, just ask Kryten to dry hump it and your wish will be fulfilled!

Re:Why is Kryten's groin on the list?

[NerveGas]

It's a *fond* look at the ports. You know, some dude *fondly* looking at Kryten's groin...

Re:Why is Kryten's groin on the list?

[ashridah]

Can't whisk that I can see, but it CAN toast bread...

Re:Why is Kryten's groin on the list?

[Bieeanda]

...and wondering if he can plug the Rez vibrator into it...

SCART

[nozzo]

they got SCART spot on - it is s**t and I hate the oversize connectors and the way it never seems to click in so that if you actually move anything they pop out at an angle because to get a decent signal you need to buy a stupidly priced 'quality' cable that's as thick as a ships rope and is too heavy for the friction held connector - hmphhhh

oh but HDMI cable, you sleek sexy thang, you're my new interconnect friend

Re:SCART

[ashridah]

HDMI? sleek? sexy? Clearly you've never seen a HDMI cable made from this stuff.

The specs down the bottom proudly include:
Overall diameter: 11mm (approx. 7/16 inch)

1.1cm!

That said, it's able to carry a HDMI signal, within spec, for well over 100 feet. Not that you need that when your xbox/blu-ray player/ps3/media centre/whatever is 5 feet away from your flatscreen, but yeah... thick cable. (It's crazy the hoops you have to jump through to get full HDMI 1.3a compliance, apparently. 1.2 was pathetically easy to work with, and could be done fairly cheaply. Most thinner cables won't pass 1.3a tho, it's much more strict about the degradation over 40 feet)

How about 113?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ident? Who uses that besides IRC (in which case you generally fake it)?

LPT port *sigh* oh them good ol' days

[beckerist]

My FIRST "networked environment:" Two computers, a bi-directional crossover LPT cable and some REALLY crappy Novell software. Definitely some frustrating times just to play Warcraft I against a single friend!

Re:LPT port *sigh* oh them good ol' days

[glitch23]

My FIRST "networked environment:" Two computers, a bi-directional crossover LPT cable and some REALLY crappy Novell software. Definitely some frustrating times just to play Warcraft I against a single friend!

Assuming your single friend was a female, I think you should have been practicing connecting to another one of her ports besides LPT.

Re:LPT port *sigh* oh them good ol' days

[Nimey]

Wait, wait, what? Why would you do that when null-modem serial cables were pretty much standard? It's not like you can make use of the extra speed on that kind of game, and it'd avoid the crappy Novell software.

Re:LPT port *sigh* oh them good ol' days

[greyhueofdoubt]

Wow, that brought back some memories... Same here, except it was Diablo, not warcraft.

I still have the 9-foot long cable, and nothing to plug it in to :)

-b

SCSI is not dead

[billsf]

The standard 50, 68 and 84pin variety is headed for the heap. It will be many years (ten or more) until legacy SCSI is no longer supported. In the meantime, just about the only way to talk to a high-speed external device is the SCSI protocol. There is SAS (Serial attached SCSI) and SATA which is slightly simplified SAS. SCSI is almost exclusively used for all USB UMASS ports. It is also the protocol most likely on the IEEE-1394 port, but its dead already. (good riddance)

Let me take exception with the first (real) poster's remarks. The phone port, perhaps you were thinking "WIN/LINmodem" is also a standard two-wire to four-wire converter (hybrid) with digital in and out. (sound card.) This, for the forseeable future will have use in VoIP and test applications for as long as copper is use. A 'phone port' could be very handy for traveling.

Finally: Who slipped the "Cowboy Neil" port in this discussion?

Re:SCSI is not dead

[prockcore]

Obsolete PORTS, not obsolete protocols.

It's like saying BNC ports aren't dead because 10baseT is similar to 10base2 which used BNC connectors.

FCC mandate

[Chris Snook]

Firewire is certainly more niche than USB, but in its niche, it's very good. That may be why the FCC has mandated that hi-def digital cable providers in the United States provide firewire-equipped cable boxes to any customers that ask for them. If you're doing media capture, it's really an excellent interface. If you want to plug in general purpose peripherals, USB is usually a better fit.

Re:FCC mandate

[caveman]

Over here in the UK, the high definition video providers are locking their signals up tightly inside HDCP-encrypted HDMI links, and not allowing you access to the high definition signals in any way. No component outputs, no RGB, no VGA, nada. Very annoying.

Re:FCC mandate

[m85476585]

But good luck using the firewire port. I have a Comcast DVR, and it was a huge pain to get video off it.

1. Drivers came from a random third party website, and they are not that great. There are no drivers from Comcast or Motorola (the manufacturer).
2. Recorded TV had to be played in realtime
3. The output was a .TS file, and I had a hard time finding free programs that could convert it to standard mpg files.
4. If I fast-forwarded while copying a recording, the output file would not play

They also have 2 USB ports, an eithernet port, and an eSATA port on the back, all of which are disabled by firmware. From what I have read, the hard drive uses a nonstandard file system, so I can't take it out and copy everything that way.

Re:FCC mandate

[entrigant]

A .ts file is mpeg audio and video. It's simply a container designed for broadcast. mplayer at the very least can demux it for you. It's a standard demultiplex and multiplex back into a different container.

Re:FCC mandate

[ben there...]

3. The output was a .TS file, and I had a hard time finding free programs that could convert it to standard mpg files. That's a MPEG-2 Transport Stream. Assuming the codec used is also MPEG-2*, you can use Project-X to convert TS to "M2P", aka MPEG-2 Program Stream files, aka your "standard MPEG-2 files." In addition to trans-muxing to a new container, it will also check for timestamp and other errors, join multiple TS files, and a few other things. Free, GPL, Java, cross-platform.

*Unlike some H.264 TS broadcasts in Europe. Those are a bitch to deal with.

Re:FCC mandate

[m85476585]

That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. For some reason I had to upgrade InterVideo to get the files to play in Windows Media Player (ivivideo.ax was crashing), but it works now. It even converts HD video with no problems.

I know I could play the files in VLC without upgrading InterVideo, and even without converting them to .mpg. The problem is that VLC will play anything, and if I ever want to edit the video, I need to make sure that the output is a working file. Windows Media Player is a good way to test that.

I don't record from my DVR anymore since it was too inconvenient. Instead, I am recording stuff with a Media Center PC. Ideally, I would like to convert everything to h.264 to save space, but it takes about 5 hours to convert an hour of video on a 3GHz P4. I'll upgrade to a Core2Duo eventually.

PS/2

[genesus]

It is getting harder and harder to find standard built pcs with ps/2; however, I always make sure I get one. No mushy rubber dome with fading sticky keys and too many buttons can ever replace my mid 80's model m space saver.

And in regards to the above comment about USB not caring what you plug into it, many ps/2 to usb adaptors simply don't work. USB can be especially picky with some hardware requiring an actual ps/2 to usb signal converter, which, funny enough, usually look exactly the same as the non-working adapters.

Re:PS/2

[CSMatt]

I bought a PS/2 to USB converter at Radio Shack some time ago. It was expensive (~$20-$30) but it worked perfectly and the machine registered my mouse as HID-compliant. Of course, that was after I exchanged my first converter that was DOA.

Re:PS/2

[residieu]

I still use PS/2 ports because my KVM switch doesn't handle USB, and I haven't seen any that do (not that I've looked all that hard in a while)

Re:PS/2

[Stormwatch]

It is getting harder and harder to find standard built pcs with ps/2; however, I always make sure I get one. No mushy rubber dome with fading sticky keys and too many buttons can ever replace my mid 80's model m space saver.

Unicomp makes keyboards with the same technology as the Model M, and now they have USB models too.

Missing option

[hcdejong]

ADB. It was brilliant in its day, better than USB in some areas, e.g. it included the ability to switch your computer on/off from the keyboard.
Also, Apple made a habit of including ADB ports in its monitors, so you could plug your keyboard and mouse into the monitor. Pity that never caught on either.

Re:Missing Option

[Mike Buddha]

Good bye and good riddance, RS-232! No more funky voltage levels to burn up your hardward! Woot!

Re:Missing option

[prockcore]

Also, Apple made a habit of including ADB ports in its monitors, so you could plug your keyboard and mouse into the monitor. Pity that never caught on either.

What? I'm sitting in front of two Dell 1901FPs and they each have two usb ports right on the side. I also can put my computer to sleep and wake it back up from the keyboard.

Re:Missing option

[edalytical]

I really love ADC (Apple Display Connector) it's power, dvi and usb in one cable.

Re:Missing option

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

I have a Dell 1707FP and if the 1901 is the same, you might want to move the keyboard/mouse to the two ports on the back near the DVI port -- Free the side ports up for usb thumbdrives/ipods/other more transitory connections.

Re:Missing option

[DurendalMac]

You can turn the computer on via USB, too. Apple had power buttons on their early USB keyboards. I don't know why they removed them, though.

Re:Missing option

[hcdejong]

Those had connectors with an extra pin, which made them more expensive and a source of problems (couldn't use hubs or USB extension cable).

Re:Missing option

[hcdejong]

Sleep/wake is nice, but ADB Macs could be started up from the keyboard as well.

Re:Missing Option

[TERdON]

'(the frankly much better)'

Please show me a well-working 50 m USB cable. For many applications, USB is superior, but not all.

Re:Missing option

[enderwig]

You forget about the bad part of ADB: it was powered. You had to shutdown your computer in order swap out a mouse, keyboard, joystick, or tablet.

Re:Missing option

[Anonymous Coward]

Both of my PCs have the option to power on the computer via keyboard (either USB or PS/2).

Re:Missing option

[Phroggy]

It was also possible to, while attempting to plug in an ADB device while the computer was on, slip and accidentally short a couple of pins together, causing the computer to suddenly reboot.

I only did that once.

Come to think of it, I suppose this would probably only be likely when connecting a keyboard that didn't have the ADB cable hard-wired in. You could only short the pins like that if it was a male end connected to the computer that you were plugging into the female connector on a device like a keyboard. Apple did make such a keyboard, but I wonder if this is the reason they stopped.

Actually, although ADB was officially not hot-pluggable, people did it all the time. Usually the only noticeable side-effect was that ADB mice would track very slowly until the computer was rebooted.

Re:Missing option

[MacTenchi]

I especially liked how hot-plugging a keyboard or mouse might fry your motherboard. Good times.

Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Neil Blender]

If you ever get the chance, pull a running scsi drive out of a computer. Hold it your hand and try rotating your wrist. Very nice angular momentum demonstration. The platters are spinning so fast the drive will counter your wrist rotation quite forcibly.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[OrangeTide]

... and that is the last time Neil was allowed at the data center.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Neil Blender]

Nah. I came across that when I was tasked with turning 50 busted servers into as many working servers as possible. That was when I learned about durability and the fact that processors could be hammered into wood beams quite nicely. The pins are like little nails. I had a nice little column of pentiums.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: hot swap

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[ibmjones]

Actually, I do that all the time at my datacenter - usually when I have to replace a drive. And yes, when you do pull a running drive, you will feel the disks spinning so hard that at time it feels like it is about to spin out of your hand.

Of course, make sure that server that you are pulling the drive from has reliable Hardware RAID. :D

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Anonymous Coward]

torquing them while spinning will deform the platters. Not exactly the best thing to do. If you were a legitimate IT guy you would power down the drive before you swap them.
Hot swap doesn't mean you are supposed to do it while the drive is running, just that you're able to remove the drive while the system is running.

Knock a year off the drive's life every time you twist it while it's spinning to feel it try and kick out of your hand.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Clearly, you have much to teach me master.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[DurendalMac]

That's nothing. A tech I knew had a bad 15k RPM SCSI hard drive he decided to play with. He opened it up and bent the platters around, then plugged it in for kicks. Somehow, it only shook around like crazy and didn't break apart at high speeds. Dumbass is lucky to be alive.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[greyhueofdoubt]

One day at work I found an old pneumatic router that appeared unused. This thing was nothing more than a big aluminum casting around the bearings and turbine. At 120 psi, the thing took about 45 seconds to spool up to speed, which I'd estimate to be around 60,000 rpm. Imagine your drive spinning 4 times as fast with 10 times the mass!

I wish we had kept that thing- it sounded like an f-16 JFS spooling up.

-b

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Anonymous Coward]

You jest, but you've obviously never had any experience or never tried.

I used to pull scsi drives live all the time. In SGI's, you could actually plug in a SCSI drive live and run a command to recognize it without having to reboot the entire system. On hot swap RAID units, pulling a drive live was the whole selling point.

On various other Intel boxes, I pulled an already recognized SCSI drive live and moved them from machine to machine, then put the drive back live after making changes or copying data on another machine. I used to put a bunch of drives on one box and boot them up, then pull them out live and move them over to another box and boot up just so I could swap data quickly. This was back before USB and firewire became more ubiquitous Serial ports, parallel ports, and 10 Megabit wasn't quite up to the task of really high speed transfers back in the day. Back then, not everyone got the pricier 100 Megabit. Swapping out SCSI disks this way made disk copies quick and easy without the need for a dedicated drive copier. The only systems I encountered that couldn't do live drive swaps were HP's. On HP Vectras and Kayaks(Both PII & PIII), pulling a drive live caused a system reboot. Except for the HP's, I did my installs in 1/3 the time, which gave me tons of extra time to work on other stuff.

I've done this with certain IDE drives as well. If the drive was an identical model, you could swap them live. I didn't have to spend an extra $2000 for an IDE drive duplicator. I had an old box that I ran redhat 6.2 24/7 and after a few years the IDE cable vibrated loose, so I just plugged it back in. I used the box as my NAT, firewall, gateway, and router as well as a simple SSH and Apache server. When the cable popped lose, SSH and Apache stopped working, but rest continued to work. I had compiled the kernel to run within 32 MB so it didn't have to swap. It continued running all day before I got home. I couldn't ssh or see the web page, but I was still able to Remote desktop through my port forward and use that box to test my outbound connections.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[langelgjm]

It doesn't even have to be SCSI, and you certainly don't have to rip it out :-), I've noticed that with regular IDE drives - hold them as you turn off the computer, and rotate as you say, you'll notice it.

Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out?

[Neflyte_Zero]

... And THAT was the last time Neil was allowed behind a PC workbench.

Firewire is getting to be like Beta

[snowwrestler]

Technically superior, but losing in the consumer marketplace to a cheaper standard that has better market penetration. While at the same time, video pros continue to use and rely on it (and will for many years).

Re:Firewire is getting to be like Beta

[Alioth]

Consumer level video cameras tend to also have Firewire ports for pulling off the video. Except it may be disguised as iLink, but that's just the Sony name for Firewire.

My relatively inexpensive video camera only has Firewire for getting video off of it.

No Centronics or RS232.

[starling]

Where's the love?

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on... Centronics is in there... it is just named SCSI, because well, they didn't want to deal with all the 50pin/68pin/80pin/SCA/SCA2 versions... to them, it is simply SCSI....

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[OrangeTide]

I agree. missing from the article:

RS232 (DB25 and DB9)
Centronics B-36 (IEEE 1284)
ADB
AT keyboard (DIN-5) - remember when every keyboard came with an adapter for this instead of USB?
VESA Local Bus
DB13W3 - always wondered why this wasn't universally used for VGA
1/8" stereo jack (aka TRS)

All of these were fairly common and fairly obsolete (although TRS is still used by musicians)

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[karnal]

I've got 2 nits to pick:

1. RS232 --> I work in the networking/telecom industry, and this is still alive and well as an interface. So much so I have a spare usb-->serial converter for laptops/desktops that don't have this port.

2. 1/8" stereo jack --> what? Other than cell phones that choose a smaller form factor of this (or an altogether different mini usb adapter etc) most headphones use the 1/8" headphone plug, except for the highest of the high end, which has 1/4".....

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[OrangeTide]

You are correct. I meant the 1/4" jack (which is what the wikipedia link pointed to).

RS232 is kind of funny, because it is obsolete on the desktop market. You don't find peripherals(modem, mouse, etc) in an average consumer's home/office anymore. RS232 is certainly useful, I use it as a development interface all the time and some devices I design actually presents RS232 as the main configuration interface (routers).

I know people who primarily work with systems that have an ISA bus too. Plenty of PC/104 peripherals only talk ISA, and there is still a market for these because people do not want to entirely control systems which could result in unreasonable interruptions in operations.

Dead as in, no longer mainstream. Many home computers do not have RS232 ports anymore. And the funny DB25 ports are basically dead everywhere. PS/2 ports are available on most motherboards, but it's basically an obsolete interface too.

Another obsolete interface is the old MIDI port. Seems like a lot of devices are doing MIDI-over-USB instead. Plenty of people have old gear and MIDI will be around for another 50 years. But I suspect in the next 5-10 years we'll notice fewer and fewer new devices made with the old MIDI ports.

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most marine electronics (survey equipment, GPS, sonars...) works on RS232 or 485.

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[Crusty Cracker]

RS232 is nowhere near dead. It's very heavily used in controlling and collecting data from industrial equipment.

In the private sector? Yeah, it's dead, but there are lots of us who use it every day when we go to work.

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[starling]

Yep it's still used a lot, just not so much in the home computer world.

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[Eskarel]

RS232 is still very much in use on all sorts of things like switches, the systems which buzz you to tell you you're meal is ready, and a whole bunch of other things. RS232 is a port that can be programmed to do pretty much anything without requiring you to have much in the way of processing power.

Generally if you want something to do something odd, and you want to do it in a manner which is pretty well as basic and reliable as you can possibly make it you use RS232.

Re:No Centronics or RS232.

[TheOrquithVagrant]

Though it's increasinly rarely used by regular consumer, RS232 is still very much around, and I'd argue it's not even technically "obsolete", since at least for one of its purposes - low-level kernel debugging/troubleshooting/development - none of the new standard ports that can do what it does for that purpose.

Firewire sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had quite a few computer illiterate friends buy some kind of device for their PC that uses firewire, only to find out that they don't have firewire. Just another crappy technology put out by Apple who would like everyone to use their one type of everything and pay a hefty royalty for the privilege.

Re:Firewire sucks...

[primalamn]

why is it crappy? any documentation on that? Do you even know where FW has strength? Who uses it? Your anecdote is weak and incomplete to be useful.

Re:Firewire sucks...

[ThePromenader]

small % of market != obsolete.

The only thing as fast as (recently implemented) firewire (800) is ethernet. The fact that PC computers (representing a majority of the computer market) don't have firewire doesn't mean that the technology is outmoded by another, or useless. The article is a fun read, but factually it is a load of sh*te.

Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[theolein]

Actually, it was this morning. I had trashed a colleague's external drive, and along with it 100GB of data. In a flat panic, I hauled my Firewire 800 RAID enclosure from Lacie, and together with the totally amazing Data Rescue II from Prosoft, I had almost all of his data back back by Lunch today. The sheer speed of a Firewire 800 drive compared to a USB 2.0 drive made it all worth the while. USB simply doesn't compare in terms of reliability and speed.

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't both specs vastly exceed the sustained write capability of a magnetic disk drive? What the fuck?

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[Anonymous Coward]

So tell us about the fucking disco.

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[Swampash]

In my experience (and I use both interfaces quite a bit) USB 2.0 doesn't compare in terms of reliability and speed with Firewire 400.

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[Fneb]

Actually, it was this morning. I had trashed a colleague's external drive, and along with it 100GB of data. In a flat panic, I hauled my Firewire 800 RAID enclosure from Lacie, and together with the totally amazing Data Rescue II from Prosoft, I had almost all of his data back back by Lunch today. The sheer speed of a Firewire 800 drive compared to a USB 2.0 drive made it all worth the while. USB simply doesn't compare in terms of reliability and speed. I'm not sure if I'm reading a /. comment or an advert. For two companies at once! How much did you get paid for that?

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[m85476585]

No. A 1TB Samsung drive has an average read speed of 91MB/sec, according to Tom's Hardware. Firewire 400 has a maximum transfer rate of 49.152MB/sec (a bit less than 400mbps due to some overhead). Firewire 800 has a maximum transfer rate of 98.3MB/sec (a bit less than 800mbps). USB 2.0 is about 35MB/sec (about 2/3 the theoretical speed) because it has a lot of overhead. Another benefit of Firewire is that it does not use the CPU (although that shouldn't be an issue these days).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[Anonymous Coward]

since when has Lunch been a proper noun?

Re:Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco

[DurendalMac]

No, he's right. Data Rescue II is awesome software. I'm a Mac tech and I've seen that pull data from drives that I was sure would be unrecoverable. As long as the platters spin and it can still read the thing, DRII can probably get the data out.

SCSI is dead, long live SAS

[Chris Snook]

Parallel SCSI is very, very dead, but it's being killed off by SAS, not SATA. SAS is also killing off Fibre Channel disk drives, as it makes more sense these days to use SAS within the RAID array, and then use Fibre Channel to connect to the hosts.

I don't know what they're smoking that makes them think infiniband will replace all of this, but I want some. Infiniband is great for clusters, but putting it inside a laptop is idiotic.

Is PCMCIA really dead?

[Frosty Piss]

The say that PCMCIA is dead and anyway most laptops have wi-fi built it. Of the two fairly new laptops I own, the built in wi-fi sucks. Is PCMCIA really dead?

Re:Is PCMCIA really dead?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yes.

PCMCIA was replaced largely by the ExpressCard format.

Re:Is PCMCIA really dead?

[Tamerz]

No, PCMCIA is not dead. New laptops come with ExpressCard slots which is a PCMCIA specification. It is not backwards compatible though, but I have seen adapters.

Re:Is PCMCIA really dead?

[QuantumRiff]

long live the "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms" cards!

Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefits

[rolfwind]

anymore? I know the drives are built better but that comes with the price premium.

Less CPU usage? (Although with multiple cores, I assume something like that too becomes less and less important.)

for nerds...

[nguy]

For nerds, it's obviously the "P" (male) and "V" (female) ports that are, for practical purposes, never used and hence obsolete.

I know, people like to make sure that their "P" port remains gleaming and in good shape by regularly polishing it, but, seriously, give it up guys.

Re:for nerds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most nerds have another port marked "A" (auxiliary). It may appear that a "P" connector fits here as well, but users are reminded that this is outside the design spec and voids your warranty. Nevertheless, some users report good connectivity. Other users report data loss and equipment damage.

Re:for nerds...

[RDW]

Note also that inserting the P connector into the wrong type of V port can seriously damage the P connector:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=1968092&pageindex=1

Re:for nerds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn. As a CS nerd, I see P and V and think Prover and Verifier (terms from Interactive Proof theory). It took me a second to realize that you meant the first letters of the male and female anatomy "ports", since I was wondering if you were making an reference to relationship roles... like the male has to offer proof that he was just out with the the guys, and the girl interactively verifies that he's telling the truth. She does this by doing a random binary search on his web of potential lies; this gives some percent chance of revealing the lie.

Girl: What were you doing last night from 6pm to 6am?
Guy: Out with the guys!
Girl: [flips coin] What were you doing from midnight to 6am?
Guy: We were hitting bars and playing cards.
Girl: [flips coin] What were you doing from midnight to 3am?
Guy: We hit some bars.
Girl: [flips coin] Name a bar you went to between midnight and 1:30am?
Guy: [Busted] Honey, I'm sorry i lied. I promise I won't code all night again. :(

Re:for nerds...

[Anonymous Coward]

P and V are also names for locking operations in threaded programming (from Dutch).

Firewire dead?

[jdb2]

I don't think so. We already know about the upcoming 3.2GB/s standard, but there is more.
They plan on doubling the speed to 6.4GB/s -- google for S6400. Also, the new standard(s)
extend firwire so as to allow it to operate over other mediums, such as Ethernet, Coax, and Fiber.

Yes, Firewire looks really dead to me. No matter what country a Cnet editor comes from, he/she's
probably an idiot. (eg. why didn't they include 32-bit PCI?)


jdb2

Re:Firewire dead?

[jdb2]

Oops. Replace all uppercase "B"'s with lowercase ones. Or, if you prefer, s/B/b/ ;)

jdb2

Re:Firewire dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

32 bit PCI is dead? Only just in the past few months have companies finally released sound cards for PCI Express, and if you're looking for higher end sound cards you're still stuck with 32 bit PCI.

Re:Firewire dead?

[jdb2]

It might not be dead, but it's dying.
I don't see it alive 2 years from now.


jdb2

mod parent insightful

[JamesRose]

I can't be the only one who found it poignant!

Oh, *that* sort of port.

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person who was expecting things like port 17 (motd), port 70 (gopher) and port 23 (telnet - well, we can hope).

I have to admit...

[NerveGas]

as much as I love my firewire - especially firewire 800 - the vast majority of people say "firewha?" All they know is USB. And just like Beta vs. VHS. the technially superior standard is not the winner, but the one that wins widespread adoption.

Of the average folks that I know, the only ones I know who have even heard of firewire are folks that transfer from their camcorder to their PC - and those aren't many.

Re:I have to admit...

[Catbeller]

Just tossing it in, here. Intel fathered USB. Apple created Firewire. Intel hated Apple and Firewire, as it was a contemporaneous standard and a superior one. So, what's a near-monopoly gonna do? Make it known that putting Firewire on a motherboard wouldn't be a good move on a manufacturer's part, not good at all. Putting USB on would be a goood idea. So any sane company put USB on and ignored Firewire. Done. And to take care of the two old canards, no, Apple didn't make it expensive to license. It was a buck a device at first, and very soon they waved the license fee. And a chip set that controls Firewire may be more complex than a USB chip set, but in the electronic manufacturing world that complexity doesn't cost any more, not more than pennies. A chip set is a chip set; they cost nothing to make after the investment is recovered. We're stuck with a slow, tortured external bus 'cause it was Intel's baby.

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

A list of obsolete ports? Seriously? People get paid to write this stuff?

Why not? People get paid to run a forum you discuss it in.

A few more

[huxrules]

If they were going to go with ISA then they should have talked about VESA. Which I remembered was crap. And what about VGA (DB-15) ports and serial (DB-9). (honestly serial is still used in many many industrial applications- but not so much in the home). And I don't agree with the firewire- I just bought a 1tb external drive and was happy to see firewire still on it. Also usb 1.1 should have been included- boy was that crap! And remember those gamer ports of the past (DA-15)- for joysticks- those were silly.

Re:A few more

[Lehk228]

hey kid, go back to doing your homework or something, those "gamer" ports are called MIDI ports and were meant for musical instruments. they also happened to be conveniently easy to use as a gaming interface.

Re:A few more

[Lehk228]

also get off my damned lawn

Re:A few more

[CSMatt]

VGA isn't dead. I see it all the time on modern laptops.

Re:A few more

[huxrules]

damn dude you must be old (because I am). I cant remember a midi cable that wasn't the DIN (round) type. But I do remember the external "ribbon cable" that I used to hook up 5.25" drives to my (my parents) apple IIe. I have no idea what those ports were - but they were ancient. Probably even older ports- token ring network port (BNC if I remember)- totally sweet. Those seemed to have gone out of fashion.

Re:A few more

[generica1]

You should check out this midi cable...

Seems C|Net could have cut some more.

[CatOne]

And caught the author of this cheezeball article in their round of layoffs yesterday.

Firewire (IEEE1394) is dead, but....

[billsf]

Future extreme 'firewire' ports will use a fibre pair and two pieces of copper to carry the power. Please standardise the voltage that uses the copper. Also make it AC at >20kHz. It should be below 48V, AC or DC no matter what, for safety reasons. "Firewire" in the form of IEEE1394, as we know it, is dead, but some concept of a general purpose port that can carry more than 2.5W could live on for quite some time.

Re:Firewire (IEEE1394) is dead, but....

[serviscope_minor]

Why? All modern electronics these days uses some kind of power converter, since the mix of chips tend to use a mix of voltages. They're also all very low, so unless you plan on shipping around 5A worth of 3.3V, there's going to be power converters around. So. why not let the device supplying the power have the flexibility?

Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi

[asuffield]

Vastly better performance on all counts, which matters when you're attaching fifty drives to your bus. Incidentally, the current generation is called SAS ("Serial-Attached SCSI") and uses the same connectors as SATA, running the SCSI wire protocol. Modern RAID cages will accept both SATA and SAS drives in the same bays.

Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi

[kithrup]

Sure... SCSI gives you the ability to have more drives per controller. And if you don't have NCQ on the SATA drive, SCSI is going to be quite a bit faster (assuming roughly-equivalent data rates, of course -- not comparing SCSI-I to SATA here :)).

For most people, however, SATA is probably good enough. And USB for when they need some extra (but much slower) storage.

Server people, however still like SCSI. Even if it's Serial-Attached SCSI these days ;). (But a bunch of SATA drives in a FibreChannel RAID box is still a way to go.)

Missing from List

[surata]

My RS232 serial connectors in 25 and 9 pin incarnations are just as functional and now obsolete as any parallel port. AT Keyboard connectors are even more obsolete than the ps/2 connectors that replaced them Are Game ports obsolete? I have not looked at joysticks lately, but look that they would be fine with USB Technology - except of course in terms of backwards computability. Those silly audio in/out ports ought to be obsolete IDE connectors are pretty much obsolete: I won't buy a pc without SATA any more. VGA has been replaced with HDMI The only connectors on the back of a PC that are not obsolete are Power, USB, Network, and HDMI. Well we still need the audio.

Re:Missing from List

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you only use your computer for games that is right. But try to connect to a router without IOS if you dont have a RS232 port... I got 2 USB to Serial converters and sometimes I still can't send break signals into RONMON.

Re:Missing from List

[jmauro]

Hmm... I really like RS-232 and it's distant cousin RS-422. I still buy notebooks with at least one of those ports since the USB/RS-232 converters just don't cut it when your trying to connect to routers, switches, camera controllers, and other random devices which will never have USB ports, but always have a RS-232 port somewhere. Also the complete lack of drivers needed to connect to the devices with RS-232 gives them a big win over any of the silly usb whippersnapper upstarts.

Re:Missing from List

[bitrex]

RS232 is still quite popular in industrial and control applications (I'd guess mainly because of technological inertia and the amount of old equipment that still does its job fine) - to the point that many electronics suppliers sell hundred dollar PCI to RS-232 cards to connect new machines to old gear.

Re:Missing from List

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use a VGA connector as i have a VGA Monitor... bought it in 2005 with my computer from Dell, also the TV i just bought an Olevia has a VGA and VGA-Component Port alongside the HDMI.

My Handheld GPS Unit (albeit 3-4 years old) uses an RS-232 Serial Port although my computer didnt ship with one so i had to buy an adapter.

You also need a 56K modem depending on where you live in the United States, although i dont use mine for internet i use it to record phone calls and my friend 10 miles away has only dial-up internet availability... AT&T hasnt strung up the DSL close enough to them yet and doesnt plan to do so anytime soon.

As far as audio in and out ports (assuming you are referring to mini-jack) i wonder when you last used headphones in your computer or hooked up speakers that cost less than $50 i find that i need my ports.

Oh, that kind of port

[noidentity]

I thought it was going to be about obsolete TCP ports, like 21, 70, 79, etc. Does this earn me an upgrade to my geek card?

FireWire and dorky kids

[CSMatt]

For some reason, despite the incredibly shaky start USB had...it still managed to beat FireWire to be the most popular data-transfer system. Sure, you could argue popularity isn't everything, but try telling that to all the dorky kids at schools across the world. I'm sure those dorky kids are fans of FireWire, so they'll probably like hearing that.

how about USB?

[Chirs]

With USB keyboards and mice, and the number of monitors with USB ports on them now, I think we've got the equivalent.

Advantages of SAS

[Wesley Felter]

Dual-ported drives
Expanders (128 drives per controller)
Wide ports (1200 MB/s)
Better external cabling (not like the kludge that is eSATA)

SCSI was better than IDE, and SAS is still better than SATA.

Re:Advantages of SAS

[jabuzz]

Add to that list tape drives and libraries. I know there are a few SATA tape drives out their, but they are mostly SCSI (increasingly SAS) and Fibre Channel.

Before anyone says tape is dead, you replace my 1.5PB library which could run of a 3kVA UPS and needs no air con to speak of, with spinning disk at anywhere near the same upfront cost let alone the running cost.

Parallel and serial great for hobbyists

[langelgjm]

Well if by "Centronics" you mean the other side of the printer cable, they did mention the parallel port. As for RS-232, one big use for these "legacy" ports (parallel and serial) is for hobbyists.

For example, I'm lucky to have a motherboard that includes a serial header, which is attached to my PIC programmer. Also, for simple projects, interfacing directly to a parallel port is often simpler than interfacing to a serial port. Hopefully there will always be add-on cards for those of us who use these "legacy" ports.

Re:Parallel and serial great for hobbyists

[MightyMartian]

Serial ports may be dead in the consumer world, but let's remember here that RS232 controllers are dirt cheap, and for one of the original purposes of the serial port; data acquisition and controller hardware, it's still king.

Re:Parallel and serial great for hobbyists

[compro01]

heh. some of the other guys here have been slaving over a hot oven (a toaster oven is a nice tool for reflow soldering) making USB PIC programmers, which uses a PIC for interfacing.

Re:Parallel and serial great for hobbyists

[starling]

I was actually thinking of the original physical port before they switched to the D-type connectors, as opposed to the interface protocol. The protocol will probably be around a while yet for the reasons you state.

Missing Option

[dkf]

RS-232! Another port killed by (the frankly much better) USB, it had the interesting feature of coming in two widths of connector. The only uses for it I ever had were for connecting my (ultra-fast at the time) 14,400 baud modem, and for programming the Mindstorms brick. (That went to USB with v2, but v1 and 1.5 used RS-232.)

Missing from the list: Atari SIO

[michaelmalak]

Atari SIO was the predecessor to USB:

These computers had a large assortment of "Intelligent" peripherals which communicated through a custom bus called the "SIO" (Serial I/O) which compared to today standards is a rather simplistic version of the USB (Universal Serial Bus). In fact the USB and the Atari SIO have a lot more in common then many would think. One of Atari's original computer engineers, Joe Decuir who created the Atari SIO bus is also one of the team of engineers at Microsoft to help design and holds patents on the USB.

dead?

[suck_burners_rice]

Looks like Firewire is dead. Just like *BSD.

Voting machines, too

[langelgjm]

PCMCIA also seems to be alive and well in most modern e-voting machines, which I always found weird.

Re:What about BSD ports? -- flamebait

[billsf]

We are mature enough not to do this, but this person doesn't know about source code. BSD is mostly MacOSX and hugely important in MSWindows, at least to XP. There are several more commercial implementations. This is not a bash to Linux. Linux is almost exclusively used in supercomputing today and a close look at "Top 500" will show the BSD niche is coming back in that area. The only non-level playing field is on the desktop. -- That's all your fault and you know who you are....

Fix to dead link.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, it's not kosher to RTFA, but ScuttleMonkey could you please provide a working link?

SATA?

[rrohbeck]

SATA isn't SCSI. It is literally the old WD1003 Task File interface sent via serial packets.

Re:Seriously?

[Midnight Thunder]

A list of obsolete ports? Seriously? People get paid to write this stuff?

Apparently people also seem to reading their pages, or reading sites that reference their articles ;)

And here I was, ...

[beat.bolli]

after reading the post's title, thinking about gopher 70/tcp...

obsolete

[G3ckoG33k]

Maybe I don't quite understand the word obsolete, but I thought that today dial up modems were obsolete regardless of where you live. A necessity perhaps, but outdated nonetheless. ;)

Re:obsolete

[Darinbob]

From the dictionary:

1 a: no longer in use or no longer useful. b: of a kind or style no longer current : old-fashioned. Dialup modems are not obsolete in the first sense at all. The second sense is entirely subjective. Fashion is always subjective.

Re:obsolete

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I realize this is slashdot and all, but I'm not really sure that dial up modems were really ever in fashion. Never really heard of a modem fashion show with models wearing modems for clothing. Thats not something that I would ever recommend. Internal modems do not good under garments make.

Re:obsolete

[frieko]

Right, so he is of the opinion that modems are old-fashioned. What's wrong with that?

Re:obsolete

[mink]

Back in the day, all the cool BBS admins has Courier HST dual standard modems. If you managed to afford one, you were probably the envy of peers.

I remember the arguments back and forth over U.S. Robotics vs. Practical Peripherals.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[Tablizer]

"goatie" will never be obsolete on slashdot, anymore than overlord welcoming.

Vastly?

[Pinky's Brain]

Flash drives offer over an order of magnitude decrease in random read access times ... now that is a vast improvement (there is a distinct lack of SAS flash drives BTW). Now ATA's command queuing has been fixed the advantages of SCSI has been eroded. SAS is very nice, but SCSI's contribution to that is rather slim and it's continued use resulting for a large part from the artificial market separation of high RPM drives.

Sometimes the I in RAID is important even with SAS, if all you are going for is large storage and high throughput SATA can be the right solution even if you are using 50 drives.

Re:Vastly?

[lgw]

(there is a distinct lack of SAS flash drives BTW). "Flash drives" could mean anything, but USB flash drives use the SCSI command protocol.

SAS is very nice, but SCSI's contribution to that is rather slim SAS *is* SCSI, defined by the same international standards body. SCSI Parallel bus is a SCSI transport. SAS is a SCSI transport. Fibre Channel is often a SCSI transport. IP can be a SCSI transport. USB can be a SCSI transport.

SCSI is everything the INCITS T10 working group defines. You seem to be confusing the transport with SCSI as a whole.

Re:Vastly?

[Pinky's Brain]

SAS is a SCSI transport, it's also a SATA transport. As for Flash drives, I meant like MTron.

Re:Vastly?

[lgw]

While you can use SATA as a SCSI transport (not sure if anyone's doing this), SAS is different than SATA. SAS has internal and external cables that support 4 connectors. You can't run SATA over a SAS cable AFAIK.

some still good for years to come

[FudRucker]

Linux gnu 2.6.24.4 #1 Tue Mar 25 12:07:33 CDT 2008 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

with this system i still use a parallel printer and PS2 mouse & keyboard with an AGP 8X graphics card, and will likely be using this same system only with newer and updated software for a long time to come, i dont think it is up to CNet to determine what is obsolete, i am sure we all know the trend for new technology (x86_64 & multi-core CPUs, Sata drives, faster RAM & bus speeds & etc) nothing wrong with progress, why buy a new car because the one you own and still runs good and is already paid for? put some miles on that thing & get your moneys worth out of it...

Oh that's just so cute.

[Anonymous Coward]

* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI ;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it.
* SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
* USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.


Oh that's cute. Are you referring to the Linux 'sd' drivers, which used to stand for 'SCSI Device'? The 'sd' drivers have been modified to support a whole range of storage devices.

Let's refer you to Wikipedia, which shoes how SATA & SCSI are different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#SATA_and_SCSI

SATA is definitely *not* SCSI. SATA is not Serial-Attached-SCSI. USB Storage is *not* SCSI.

Just because your Linux kernel uses the 'sd' driver for SATA & USB storage doesn't mean that these are actually SCSI devices.

Re:Oh that's just so cute.

[SharpFang]

Serial-Attached-SCSI supports SATA. Meaning SATA is a subset of it - a subset of the current SCSI standard which consists of 'SCSI of the old' and SATA - SAS without SATA is not SAS, it's some crippled monstrosity.

USB Storage uses SCSI command set. What more should it use to satisfy you to define it as a SCSI device?

DB25 Port

[Ohio Calvinist]

I am sad to see this on this list. I'm sure I'm not the only one on /. who absolutely hated USB printers when they first came out. They often "required" the user run the install CD to get the USB printing ports installed correctly, which usually installed a lot of crap you didn't want, and for kicks the printer port software didn't handle unplugs correctly so you have 15 instances of the printer installed everytime it gets unplugged. Weak for laptops.(HP Deskjets... I'm looking at you...)

For a long time after USB came out, I much prefered (and other than the size on compact laptops) still prefer Paralell port printing. Mostly because I can use the Windows printer control panel to add the printer on my terms only feeding it a driver. No extra crap installed that adds stuff to my system tray.

Not only that, but in a corp environment you could use prnadmin.dll to script the install of a lot of printer features much easier when you didn't have to ensure get the USB Printing support was in place, or get it working without the OEM install CD.

Low blow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent troll.

No real slashdotter thinks port 23 is obsolete.

Sega was NOT the first console with a CD drive!!!

[TavisJohn]

I had a TurboGrafx(16) with the CD Drive attachment well BEFORE Sega ever released their CD device!

Why does everyone continue to give Sega credit for the CD-Drive on consoles, when the TG(16) did it first!

Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi

[stonecypher]

and uses the same connectors as SATA

... which is why SCSI ports are obsolete.

Article misssed the point of SCSI entirely

[damn_registrars]

While you can argue back and forth whether or not SCSI is still faster than SATA, and which has the better transfer rates in what situation, they really missed one of the biggest advantages of SCSI hardware:

MTBF

SCSI drives have generally had 10x higher MTBF ratings, which means a lot when you're installing a drive in a server that needs to run for five nines. Sure, the difference in access is great, but its really the longevity that counts. Your gaming box can cope with a drive that is only supposed to stand up to a year or two of usage - you'll need more storage for your porn by then anyways - but server hard drives need to be able to take a beating constantly, and longer.

That was why I was always willing to dish out the extra coin for SCSI drives for my servers back when I was an admin.

Re:Article misssed the point of SCSI entirely

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would a 'SCSI' disk be built, physically, any different than a 'SATA', or 'FC' drive? The only difference is the onboard electronics. Disk drives with any interface can be built to the same degree of reliability.

Re:Article misssed the point of SCSI entirely

[damn_registrars]

The only difference is the onboard electronics.
That is not entirely true. Indeed, usually the failure points in hard drives end up being the moving parts themselves - think of how many drives you've owned that have died from bad bearings or slipped heads. And when the manufacturers choose which heads and bearings to use, its not a one-size-fits-all game.

Disk drives with any interface can be built to the same degree of reliability. They can, but they aren't.

Re:Article misssed the point of SCSI entirely

[drsmithy]

SCSI drives have generally had 10x higher MTBF ratings, which means a lot when you're installing a drive in a server that needs to run for five nines.

"Five nines" servers shouldn't be affected by individual drive failures. Arguably, they shouldn't be affected by _two_ simultaneous drive failures.

Parallel Ports are still Favored by CNC Equipment

[BrendaEM]

Apparently, most CNC machining is done over parallel ports. The interfaces seem easier to design/program for, but it is also claimed that there are real latency issues with USB. The bandwidth is great, but the latency is too great. The G-code is interpeted to very short bursts of control data, which might be something that the USB people never saw coming. I think that the parallel port can control several motors--at once, sending instructions at each clock cycle. Perhaps it's a OS issue, and possible to overclock the polling, but I haven't checked that. [It's kind of awful that I've looked at getting a parallel port for my Thinkpad T61P. Argh! I have an old parallel-only plotter too; sigh.]

Missed Serial

[slyall]

Who was the moron who design serial?, about 200 different combinations just to be able to console something.

Sure everything these days is ( usually ) 8N1 (bad luck if it isn't) but then you just have to play with the speed ( 1200, 4800, 9600, 19200, 38400, 57600) and actual connector ( 9 pin, 25 pin, rj45) , the gender ( male or female) and the magic sauce ( straight through, null modem, rollover) .

Seriously great fun when your machine has died, a few thousand customers are offline and you are trying to just login and fix it.

Please tell me there is some USB console standard that is just plug and play.

Re:Missed Serial

[Crusty Cracker]

If there was a USB console standard most would avoid it at all costs due to the unreliability of USB. While figuring out settings can be aggravating, if you have the potential to put a few thousand customers offline, then you damn-well better know those settings ahead of time (BTW, there are these things called label makers...)

"Not a bus"

[interiot]

Okay, okay, we admit it. ISA isn't a port at all, it's a bus.

Was this intentional humor? If Kryten's groin counts, then all of the items mentioned after ISA are buses, and two mentioned before (SCSI and Firewire) were as well.

Does not deserve to be read

[ACalcutt]

I clicked the link and noticed it was multiple pages so I closed it right away. This article does not deserve to be read.

Die, Ziff-Davis! DIE!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ziff-Davis filed for bankruptcy like months ago. When the hell are they going to be obsolete and take their shitty shovelloads of slashvertizing down the crapper with them?

Ziff-Davis: 10 years of professional trolling through 100,000 sock puppet sites.

5200 RPM drives

[Nimey]

Hardly, ignoring that the author meant 5400 RPM. In the Windows 3.x days our IDE hard drives were 3600 RPM and didn't even use DMA or multi-sector reads. We thought we had it good because it'd take over 100 floppies to store the same amount of data.

You tell kids that nowadays, and they wouldn't believe you.

Re:5200 RPM drives

[jimicus]

IDE hard drives? Capacity of "over 100 floppies"?

Lucky sod. I had an ST506 hard disk with a capacity of 20MB. Floppies were formatted to 800K (Acorn ADFS, dont'cha know?), so that's a capacity of around 25 floppies.

(Mind you, this was before the days of Win3.x)

Parallel ports!?

[just_forget_it]

Parallel ports? Obsolete? Tell that to the perfectly good HP Laserjet 4100 I grabbed off a pallet of junk at work that is now sitting comfortably in my office! I didn't even need to restart my computer when I plugged it in, it just started working.

Re:Parallel ports!?

[imsabbel]

"Grapped from a pallet of junk at work"
Hey, you answered your question right there.

PCMCIA

[NotFamous]

PCMCIA is being replaced by ExpressCard, not USB. This was not a deep article.

Re:PCMCIA

[deniable]

To quote from the article: "But worse than Scart, it's nearly impossible to say PCMCIA at all, without getting all the letters jumbled up and your technological pants tied in a knot, so we generally have to refer to the cards that use the system as 'PC Cards'."

That's why they renamed it PC Card in ~'94. The number of pinheads who still insist on trying (and failing) to say PCMCIA is annoying. Then again, that may be why the author thinks it's obsolete.

In a disco?

[rumli]

You apparently left out the most interesting part of the story.

Firewire Trumps USB2

[Joe Burnett]

IMHO, firewire is still the best for external disk storage, especially if you're using it for activities such as virtual machine images. Here's an article I authored when I was benchmarking Firewire against USB2 performance: http://www.joeburnett.net/2008/01/30/firewire-vs-usb2-performance-for-external-disk-storage/

favorite dead port...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

cassete...

half an hour to load a 32 kB game (that's 32 thousand bytes, kids) if the cassete player didn't trash the tape...

good days. good days indeed...

what? no GPIB?

[bball99]

- talk about an old port!

They are right about the firewire port... sorta.

[NimbleSquirrel]

The Firewire port in the picture is the old 6 pin Firewire 400 port (IEEE1394a). While it is still used, the standard has been surpassed 9 pin Firewire 800 port (IEEE1394b). In saying that, the new standard is still backwards compatible with Firewire 400, although an adapter cable is needed. Furthermore, the same 9 pin connector is to be used for the planned S3200 Firewire standard (3,200Mb/s, with the possibility to expand to 6,400Mb/s in beta-mode only).

In saying that, the Firewire standards have allowed for other connectors. The S800T (IEEE1394c) standard allowed for 800Mb/s Firewire over Cat5e cable with RJ45 connectors, and the chipset was suposed to be able to switch between Firewire and Ethernet. I think that would have been really useful, but I can see how there would have been confusion. To date noone has picked up on that standard. Then there also support for Firewire over optical fibre, but again noone (except maybe the military) uses it.

Firewire (while not as widely used as USB) isn't disappearing anytime soon. For example, the data bus in the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning is Firewire 800 (IEEE1394b). Firewire 400 can still be found, but on things like portable HDDs Firewire 800 is taking over from the older Firewire 400 standard.

I'm not going to compare Firewire to USB since each standard has their strengths and weaknesses. Since each is suited to different tasks, and therefore different markets, it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

Firewire 400 may be dead/dying, but Firewire as a standard is still strong.

I'll have to disagree

[56ksucks]

PS/2 ports come on plenty of brand new computers. I installed a dual core athlon64 machine a few weeks ago with 2 PS/2 ports and a parallel port. Not quite as obsolete as the list claims. And PCMCIA cards are still sold in plentiful amounts. I admit USB is a very versatile port that can do the job of all 3 of these, but it has not completely replaced them. Who wants a USB device poking 3 inches out of their laptop when they can have a PCMCIA card poking out much shorter or not at all?

Note on PS/2

[geekoid]

"PS/2 does present a slight problem, namely, how do you plug the keyboard into the keyboard socket and the mouse into the mouse socket?"

That's the fault of many mobo manufacturing.
by spec there are interchangeable. Sadly, many manufactures would spend the penny to soldier the ground properly.

Re:Note on PS/2

[Vampyre_Dark]

Both my keyboard and mouse are in PS/2 ports, on a PC I just bought.

PCMCIA

[absurdist]

People
Can't
Memorize
Computer
Industry
Acronyms

3 more ports: MCA, EISA, and VESA Local Bus

[cyclocommuter]

Anyone still remember IBM's MCA which was at the time competing with Compaq, HP, and a consortium of other manufacturers that supported the EISA bus. Then there was also the first port dedicated for graphics card to use, the VESA Local Bus.

PS/2 not obsolete

[Shandalar]

Punks not dead and PS/2's not obsolete. When was the last time I needed to find a driver to make my mouse work at all? Never, because I have a PS/2 mouse. //Floppies are still punk too

Re:PS/2 not obsolete

[xSauronx]

ive never needed a driver to use a usb mouse....where are you from?

i suppose some gaming mice may *need* drivers to use all the fancy buttons, but just to act like a mouse? this is news to me.

Re:PS/2 not obsolete

[ballsofchicken]

New Zealand - that's how they pronounce 'pink' over there

Re:PS/2 not obsolete

[MrChom]

I quite agree that PS/2 isn't obsolete. I've bought multiple keyboards that have upped and died in the space of my reliable old PS/2 keyboard's life. The keys have been worn down enough to glean unnaturally, and it may have been built before the Windows key....but it's a fantastic piece of hardware and also creates a fantastic amount of noise if you get your typing up to speed on it.

Re:PS/2 not obsolete

[mmyrfield]

I really want to shoot the guy that decided to make the ps/2 ports ROUND. Wonder how that management meeting went?
PHB: "So guys, we've built this thing for connecting mice and keyboards, now we just need to decide what shape to make the connectors... brainstorm?"
Mike from engineering: "Maybe we should make them trapezoidal so that they can easily be plugged without looking"
Bob from marketing: "You know what would make a great value-add? If it were shaped like a circle, because circles are the future. "
PHB: "Go on Bob, I like where this is going..."
Bob: "And if we make sure that it plugs in at the back of the computer so that you have to pull it out every time you want to plug/unplug it that would force people to see the cool-factor that we've incorporated into it!"
PHB: "I think we have a winner with that one Bob. Mike, you need to stop living in the past. Usability is for chumps."

Re:PS/2 not obsolete

[jawtheshark]

The One True Keyboard?. I have one of those, my wife hates it because of the sound.

Fibre Channel

[ToasterMonkey]

You left out FCP (SCSI over FC), which also isn't going away anytime soon, and is responsible for good share of the apparent SCSI "deaths".

SCSI will be around for a VERY long time! :)

DeviceBay

[Animats]

For a brief period, there was DeviceBay. DeviceBay is a standard for slide-in hard drive carriers, with power, USB, and FireWire connectors that mate on slide-in. There's even a mechanical interlock so the computer can keep the device from being pulled until the drive is unmounted. There's full support for DeviceBay in Windows XP.

Never caught on.

What about VESA local bus?

[Newer Guy]

Oh, that's right-it's been long dead and buried....

One thing that I still do use every day (and they're getting harder to find) is a serial port. Part of my job involves rescuing devices that end users have trashed-and the way I do that is with a serial rescue. It wipes the memory clean and then loads a fresh copy of the firmware. Simple, fast and clean.

13W3

[Anne Honime]

DB13W3 - always wondered why this wasn't universally used for VGA

Just a wild guess, but it looks like the 13W3 is much more difficult to solder than the db15 connector. As industry is shaving off every cent they can, even at the expense of quality, it looks like a good reason. I heard it was the same with SCART (we call it péritel in France) outside of the EU where regulations made it mandatory. It never took off because soldering the female connector is really tricky (so was I told).

Switches

[Wobble-U]

The same people made a list about the top 10 off switches. #10 was a photo of a power socket, and they didn't realise it wasn't a button until someone informed them, so I don't think we can take this list very seriously :P

Parallel Ports are still useful!!

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Am I the only one who still thinks parallel ports are useful? They are a great introduction to PC interfacing for electronics. I remember getting into electronics from software when I learned how to program the parallel port to light up some LED's.

Looking at it now, something that would have needed not much else than an old printer cable, LED's and some diodes now would require a micro controller for USB interfacing and a bunch of other components, not to mention added programming complexity. And all those "USB to Parallel port" devices only work with printers, and do not function like a real Parallel port at all. I guess you could argue that the Parallel ports have become a niche, but I would not say that they are obsolete just yet.

Re:Parallel Ports are still useful!!

[m50d]

9-pin serial ports are better for that purpose, and waste less space on the back of your computer.

Re:Parallel Ports are still useful!!

[langelgjm]

I agree with GP, parallel ports are easier to work with at a low level, especially if you want to go beyond LEDs. It's very easy to interface a standard HD44780 LCD directly to a parallel port with no intervening electronics.

or

[commodoresloat]

or ever had to use your computer as a fax machine?

[X] - Strongly Disagree

[jemenake]

I had trouble thinking up many real ports that I'd put on the list (like that huge 30-something-pin D-sub connector I saw on some of my old MFM drive controllers on IBM XT's), and then I found that they didn't even restrict the race to just ports.

So, if any kind of bus or drive-connection format is fair game, then...
How about MFM (and it's cousin RLL)?
What about the huge din connectors for keyboards (those are certainly more obsolete than PS/2)
And, speaking of PS/2, if you're going to list AGP as an obsolete bus, what about the proprietary bus that IBM invented for their PS/2 line (what the hell was it called? I forget. It had an "M" in it. "Micro-channel"?). Or what about EISA?
And why is SCART representing the video ports and not CGA/EGA?
The old 15-pin D-sub game port should be on there, too. ... and floppy connectors... specifically their use as the interface for cheap-o QIC/Travan tape-drives.

And, for the last time, get the hell off my lawn, you damn kids!

what an ignorant list

[whitroth]

SCSI, obsolete? Gee, then half the drives at everyone's ISP must be obsolete....

        mark

Am I the only one...

[afabbro]

...who saw the headline and though the article would be a list of ports like 23 (tcp) and 117 (uucp)?

Re:Am I the only one...

[Beorytis]

The first thing I thought was "I bet Gopher (70) is on the list."

Re:Am I the only one...

[ohxten]

I thought it would be about application ports to different hardware.

Re:Am I the only one...

[Joe the Lesser]

I'm with you man.

I have a feeling most software guys like me thought 'a list of old school networking ports, sweet!' and were saddened to see they meant boring hardware ports.

RS232 still kicking strong....

[Junta]

RS232 is 'good enough' for text and therefore has remained the console of choice in the datacenter for many servers and any remotely serious networking equipment.

Any decent admin has to have at least a half-dozen serial cables and adapters to plug from arbitrary DB9, RJ45, RJ11, Mini-USB, and who knows what else form factors carrying nothing more than the RS232 signals in various random pinouts. Yes, I've even seen a USB form-factor that wasn't used for USB signalling.

Re:RS232 still kicking strong....

[starling]

An Interfaker is a good piece of kit to have handy too.

In the future

[SystemFault]

In the future, engineers and their managers will smarten up at last, and the number of cable/connector standards will be reduced to three:

1) Optical fiber
2) Optical fiber with a copper pair for power
3) Wireless

And the number of protocols will be reduced to one:

1) IPv6

Making everything the same will make everything cheap.

If you still use it...

[ohxten]

If you still use it, it ain't obsolete.

Missing: MIDI 5 pin DIN

[Ralph Spoilsport]

It used to be that about the only way you could move MIDI data was through the clunky old 5 pin DIN cables. Now, while keyboards still sport 5 pin DIN ports, the real action for MIDI is in USB.

RS

Re:Missing: MIDI 5 pin DIN

[bitrex]

MIDI DIN connectors are by no means dead. The fact that even the most modern sound modules and keyboards have midi/in out connectors 25 years after the creation of the standard should be proof enough of this. Musicians love vintage gear, and the ability to connect my 1986 Roland synth to a 2006 Yamaha synth and have them both understand each other is pretty amazing.

Re:Missing: MIDI 5 pin DIN

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I agree, it has its uses in that limited regard, but overall the 5 pin DIN is slowly disappearing.

I have had BUCKETS of gear in my day, while the old synths have their fetishistic value, they are, for the most part, not that great. The NI soft synth of a Moog 55 may not have the "warmth" and "immediacy" of a real Moog 55, but who cares? IT sounds "good enough", much like CDs vs. vinyl. CDs sound Good Enough. Also, the gear is unidirectional, eg: you can control a Yamaha Motif XS6 with a DX7, but WHY? You can control the DX7 with the Motif, but it's not going to give you more voices in the DX7, nor will it reduce the noise floor of the DX7, or make the DX7 sound any "better". MIDI eliminated the need for great barns filled with keybaord, and encouraged rack mounting of boxen. But with the advent of things like Reason, and the vast armada of softsynths, from M-tron to NI's catalogue, there's precious little reason to have multitudes of boxen for anything other than the fetishistic reasons of the Collector.

For that reason, I don't think the 5 pin DIN will disappear, it will simply stop being used... Kind of like how computers had PS2 ports for years after USB swept them into the trash bin.

By the way - I just bought the Motif XS6. Freakin' AWESOME. Stunning. Weird. And wonderful!

cheers,

RS

Another one: DB15

[Ralph Spoilsport]

For YEARS Apple refused to get on with the VGA thing, and Apple users had to pay a premium for a monitor that sported a DB15 port. Nasty. I still don't understand why they did that... there were Adaptor plugs for DB15 > VGA all over the place, and eventually Apple dumped DB15, about 10 years too late.

RS

Re:Another one: DB15

[Anonymous Coward]

Only to replace it with their own ADC connector, which is electrically compatible with DVI (but also provides power and USB). Even the AGP connector in the G3 and G4 powermacs is slightly different from the PC version, the pins that would later provide AGP 2x/4x selection are used for the ADC's USB signals.

Fax Server

[russlar]

if you think dial up modems are obsolete, you evidently have never lived in a rural area in north america. Or have never dealt with a fax server.

TCP?

[ironicsky]

Why do I feel Im the only person, without reading the article thought this was about TCP/IP Ports :-P, Looking at the official IANA list of TCP/IP ports, what the hell is half the crap? More over, most of it. Out of the first 1024, I can only count about a dozen or so ports of use. Off topic? Yes... In the article though, they missed another useless ones, Serial and MIDI come to mind. As does a VGA connector since most cards don't come with them anymore. Hell, Even Coax cable is going the way of the dino in our HDMI/Component world

Re: HDV

[littlerubberfeet]

I was amused when you called HDV "Better Gear". I suppose for a lot of people it is. However, just remember that HDV is the bastard format of high def sourcing. It uses rather harsh compression to fake and fit an HD signal on a DV tape. Trying to fit an HD stream into a 25 Mbps pipe is just asking for trouble. True HD is much more intensive. DVCPro HD runs at 100 Mbps and HDCAM streams at 140 Mbps. It looks awesome too, but unfortunately Varicam packges are something like $100K.

On an aesthetic note, I got to compare an XL2 with an XL H1 head to head. That is about as fair a comparison of formats that exists. The settings were as equivalent as possible. To my eye, the SD footage from the XL2 looked better than the HD footage from the XL H1, especially on pans. Hell, faster focus pulls on the XL H1 occasionally popped artifacts. Canon did well, but HDV is (or should be) a purely consumer format.

Anyway, I guess my point is, for "Pro-sumer" and lower level professional work in video and audio, Firewire is here to stay. I doubt USB (whatever version) will ever be able to handle continuous HD streaming stably. Firewire also works wonderfully between decks and computers. I hope USB2 dies too. I HATE dealing with clients who buy those drives. I have actually told a couple that I need to buy them a "real" hard drive to deliver their project, or a backup. I don't usually bother explaining.

Do I have to be the one..

[lightversusdark]

No mention of MCA? Or must it be a fond look back?
As soon as EISA was announced, we knew the game was over.

ISA isn't quite dead

[Nimey]

There's lots of old custom cards on ISA for things like controlling scientific equipment. That was the beauty of ISA: any old electrical engineer could wire-wrap his own card & it'd probably work. Once you got the %$%(! IRQ and I/O channel and DMA channel jumpers set correctly, and woe betide you if it's an 8-bit card on a well-populated "newer" machine.

Downside is that my scientist users have to keep a stock of old Windows 9x-era computers around to drive the older equipment.

Re:ISA isn't quite dead

[langelgjm]

This is actually something I wonder about. The increasing complexity of consumer computer hardware means it's quickly becoming infeasible (or at least an order of magnitude more complex) for people to build their own hardware. For someone who's learning about electronics, the parallel port is great - you can interface to pretty much anything with hardly any intervening hardware. The same can't be said of the USB port.

Re: HDV

[dgatwood]

I was amused when you called HDV "Better Gear". I suppose for a lot of people it is. However, just remember that HDV is the bastard format of high def sourcing. It uses rather harsh compression to fake and fit an HD signal on a DV tape. Trying to fit an HD stream into a 25 Mbps pipe is just asking for trouble. True HD is much more intensive. DVCPro HD runs at 100 Mbps and HDCAM streams at 140 Mbps. It looks awesome too, but unfortunately Varicam packges are something like $100K.

True, HDV is on the low end of pro formats. I should probably have said "HDV and up".

Anyway, I guess my point is, for "Pro-sumer" and lower level professional work in video and audio, Firewire is here to stay.

AFAIK, DVCPro HD supports FireWire as a transport bus, too.... I don't know that I'd call that "lower level professional".

There are far better examples

[keeboo]

That article is just retarded.
You want good examples of really interesting and obsolete connectors? Try these:

The Amiga video connector. It has analog RGB output, digital RGB output and input sync provisions, so you could build a genlock in a very simple circuit (instead of needing a TBC).

The Apple ADB bus. That thing was almost like an 80s USB equivalent.

PS/2 keyboard connector? The thing is electrically the AT connector from 1984 (what would be a better candidate of the obsolete technology btw) but it's not technologically interesting.
The Sun keyboard connector (from sun4m, older sun4u machines) is more interesting, it offered more elegance working with serial data with 0-5V levels. You can even plug such a keyboard to a RS232 port and use it under a PC Linux machine, provided you use a voltage adapter.

And calling SCSI obsolete is offensive when the list does not list the sad IDE standard, one which people used in home PCs simply because there wasn't an affordable alternative.

Re: HDV

[littlerubberfeet]

Yeah, DVCPro HD supports firewire. I shouldn't pan firewire as a prosumer transport bus, as I use it all the time. The Avid Adrenaline boxes use firewire too.

Obsolete?

[Sniper98G]

I don't think many of these ports are really obsolete. But I may be biased since I work for the government (Who hangs on to technology way past when it stopped being: manufactured, supported or even remembered by anyone else.) We retired some computers built in the 60's about three years ago.

Game Cartridge Port?

[iONiUM]

Uh, I guess they've never heard of the DS? Except it's currently the number one selling "console" (yes I realize it's a handheld). It uses a game cartridge. Nice obsolete device, idiots.

Re:Game Cartridge Port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I guess they've never heard of the DS? Except it's currently the number one selling "console" (yes I realize it's a handheld). It uses a game cartridge. Nice obsolete device, idiots.

I suspect that one of the reasons the DS is so popular is the fact that it uses cartridges. There are probably a couple of reasons for that - one to do with the ruggedness of cartridges over optical media (I've put a DS cartridge that was chewed by a dog into a replacement casing designed for a flashcart and replaced a couple of busted traces and it worked just fine - take that, UMD!), the other to do with a general inversion of the ease and convenience of piracy for the two different media types. I doubt that cartridges cost much more to produce than UMDs do these days, but the reader for optical media is much more complicated and costly than a cartridge reader and that's probably why Nintendo went with cartridges instead of developing or licencing suitable optical technology for their handheld.

It used to be that the most heavily pirated video game consoles were those with close to bog-standard optical media - Playstation, Playstation 2, X-Box etc... and depending on the particular hardware revision of your Wii you can even make and run pirated Wii games using as little as $20 worth of stuff you probably don't already own if you're handy with a soldering iron. To run pirate games on the Playstation or PS2 or Wii requires a means of duplicating the data on the discs and of convincing the console to use duplicated discs. You need to open up the console and perform potentially fatal (for the console, that is) modifications to it. That's a relatively high barrier to entry in itself. (there's apparantly a new memory-card based exploit for the PS2 that invalidates this though, and that will probably spur a whole new generation of PS2 piracy, but we'll leave that aside for the moment).

The Nintendo DS has a number of different pirate/homebrew cartridges available, which will happily accept Micro-SD cards of various capacities. There's even some piracy of the pirate products right now - one of the market leaders, R4, has recently had problems with work-alike clones and even an all-out piracy of its brand with the new "Release II" fakes that are appearing on Amazon stores. You could get a suitable cartridge and a 2-gig memory chip for it for under US$45 including postage if you weren't too fussed by the feature set or compatibility with things like download play (which is one of the things that's apparantly been rather hard to get right, for a few different reasons) and were prepared to wait a while for delivery. Similarly featured combinations would probably be in the order of US$60-80 if you wanted them sooner from a more local reseller, and probably in the order of US$80-100 from the same kind of sources for a slightly better-featured card (download play, maybe compatibility with Wii connectivity etc).

Now, the nearest competitor for the DS - the Playstation Portable - uses a unique optical format called UMD. That can store a lot more than a cartridge can, and that's both a strength and a weakness for both consoles. The largest DS games are currently only about 128 meg uncompressed - most are far smaller, and many compressed downloads are in the order of 5-25 meg, You can fit 70 or more bits of shovelware into 2 gig. PSP games? Well, for the cost of a battery you can probably make the necessary hardware to re-flash your PSP to run games from memory sticks, but you can probably only fit a few at a time on a memory stick because of their size. Pirate PSP games are something that smart teenagers will do for themselves and they'll accept the inconvenience and hassle of only having a few on there at a time as the "cost" of "sticking it to the man" and playing games for free - Pirate DS games are something that tech-savvy parents can fill a cartridge with for their six year olds, sometimes faster than they appear in the local shops.

Will Nintendo do another car

Even more obvious

[Atario]

The Port Of San Francisco has had its ass kicked by the Port Of Oakland for decades now. After containerization, it just never kept up...

Re:Even more obvious

[driftingwalrus]

The Port Of San Francisco has had its ass kicked by the Port Of Oakland for decades now. After containerization, it just never kept up... In all of this, people always forget the Port of Ostia.

Are you serious?

[Vegeta99]

I'm 21, and if they're going to go for obsolete ports, they missed some of the best:

Old PC serial ports. 21-pin or 9-pin? Hope you got adapters for both, and I hope that BBS you're connecting to can tell you how many stop bits you need.

SCSI, but not PATA/IDE? If you have the cable backwards, you don't get a coded beep or any BIOS warning, just /nothing/.

And, last, but not least, if "game carts" count as a port, why not AT motherboard powertails? I remember "rebuilding" my first PC and replacing the AT mobo with a Slot 1 mobo to get a Celeron 300 and overclock the crap out of it. I also remember trying to return my first mobo because I didn't know the power tails could go backwards - not easy when you're 12 and you used Grandma's discover card and paid her with yard work money!

MS-DOS port of Mortal Kombat

[Tumbleweed]

CONFIG.SYS: FATALITY!

a proper Lunch

[Tumbleweed]

since when has Lunch been a proper noun?

If what you eat for Lunch doesn't deserve a capital L, then you're eating the wrong food.

Damn if you do, damn if you don't

[anss123]

Dropping DB15 would have pissed off a good portion of their users just so some cheap bastards could drop an adaptor. Oh wait, why didn't Apple do this sooner?

Firewire vs USB

[quibbler]

The difference is like a $4.99 audio cable from WalMart and a $54.99 cable with shielding and gold-plated connectors.

The WalMart special will always win the masses who are fine with 95% success. Any professional will tell you that 4.99% pushing reliability to 99.99% is worth every penny of the $50 you spend.

USB is a generic consumer protocol for general utility, ask any secretary about how USB thumb drives are the best things since the invention of the weekend.
FIrewire (and firewire 800, now) is the only general-use port any professional with any clue will use for audio, video, external drives, scanners, etc.. (Fiber-channel and other niche equipment not withstanding.)

CNet unfortunately shows their colors with this article. They are sadly, pure consumer, both their readers and writers. No pro trusts USB for anything but powering toys from Think Geek.

From the dark corners of the storage world...

[HockeyPuck]

Storage is littered with all sorts of "dead ports"

Bus and Tag (connecting your mainframes with garden hose sized cables)
ESCON - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESCON
SSA - (Serial Storage Architecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Storage_Architecture
ESDI - (Enhanced Small Disk Interface, before SCSI/ATA) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Small_Disk_Interface
Various Parallel SCSI connectors (68pin/50pin) Tho the SCSI as a command-set will live on.
34pin IDC connector for a floppy drive.

And if someone asks you what PCMCIA stands for, tell them People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

Re:From the dark corners of the storage world...

[argent]

ESDI, like SCSI, supported 7 devices per cable. Unfortunately, on PCs, ESDI controllers (starting with the WD1007) abused the cabling by using the silly address-line twist (originated on the WD1003) to avoid having users jumper individual drive addresses... and the controllers and drivers baked this in.

Technically you used a separate data cable for each drive, but splitting the data cables out was pretty cheap. On our Xenix timeshared boxes at Ferranti we typically ran four ESDI drives per controller using a homebrew PCB to split the cabling.

If WD hadn't pulled this trick, IDE (which was originally a hack that basically put a virtual WD100x controller on the drive and extended the PC/AT bus to the drive) would probably have allowed 7 drives per cable too.

Oh, Cnet!

[xx01dk]

"Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut. "

Just how much of a geek this makes me, I don't know. But my USB keyboard has suffered the ultimate ignominy of being covered in recycled Mountain Dew as a result. Slut.

Obsolete?

[Mathness]

A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports It might be old, but hardly obsolete. Ah, good old Ports of call.

Cartridges Are Obsolete?

[NanotechLobster]

My Nintendo DS begs to differ.

Very handy when an old remote disintegrates

[Anonymous Coward]

My three-year-old sent our European TV's remote to Hades and the expensive replacement can't select which of the three SCART inputs to use. So this feature is a godsend: we turn on the TV, power up either the VHS, DVD, or ADSL TV box, and the TV switches to the right one.

And back when the original remote was working, we could do fancy stuff like record off the set-top box to the VHS... while watching a DVD. Any SCART I/O could be assigned to any other SCART I/O with choice of screen monitoring.

This, on a PAL/NTSC Hitachi still going strong after 14 years.

Re:Sega was NOT the first console with a CD drive!

[TheThiefMaster]

What did?

The first I heard of Turbografx was on the Wii Virtual Console, and all the games from it don't seem to be worth my money.

Perhaps this is because I live in the UK, and apparently it was never officially sold here.

reason why Apple had the different video connector

[slashbart]

When apple had this custom display connector, pc users were very often struggling just to get any kind of image on a monitor; it was a pain in the ass to figure out the correct frequencies.
The Apple connectors told the computer what kind of resolution and refresh frequency they needed (with simple wiring, no protocol whatsoever), so as usual, the Apples were plug-and-play, whereas the pc's were plug-and-fiddle and then plug-and-pray.

Then NEC invented the multisync monitor, which had as its main purpose to ease the hassles for pc's. This worked very well, the whole industry shifted, and the vga connector became a very useful standard, which was eventually also used by Apple.

Bart

Requiem for the Parallel Port

[mlwmohawk]

The parallel printer port, sniff, obsolete? It was such a great I/O port. bi-directional 8 bits. Enough bits to create good control and multiplex signals. You could even trigger interrupts.

It really is a sad time that these ports are no longer on computers. USB is OK, I guess, but writing right to the port with in/out instructions is glorious!

http://www.linuxpcrobot.org/?q=node/5

Obsolete Ports

[justinlee37]

"New Orleans" was the first that came to mind.

Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi

[walt-sjc]

Comparing the performance of a bunch of SATA drives on a FC loop, and a bunch of FC drives on an FC loop, (on the same EMC box) I can tell you that in no uncertain terms, FC drives win HANDS DOWN in performance. So it depends on what you use them for. We use SATA for archival / occasional (mostly read) data. Our core data is all on FC drives as SATA just doesn't give us the performance we need. With storage usage on our SAN being well over 100T, we do push a lot of bits. Performance matters. A lot.

firewire and scsi....

[pjr.cc]

While i agree scsi is perhaps "Dieing" i would hardly say that sata is its replacement. Sure, on some SAN's, they use sata as either "near-line" or secondary disk, but has the guy ever heard of sas or fibre-channel? obviously not. As for infiniband - anyone who's used this technology knows what a load of over-exagurated tripe that is.

On the other hand, firewire is the port that should never have died. If it had been owned by someone who had a clue, it would have been the port that replaced (nearly) everything. We wouldnt have usb (1.1 or 2), sata, pata, serial, ps/2 (it would have almost definitely made scsi redundant though) etc.. Nothing makes me quite so angry as the firewire story. Charging as much for licensing each port as sun do for scsi disks (well thats an exaggerating) but needless to say, if they'd charged a reasonable cost they'd have been rich just because of firewire ports in everyones machines. That is probably one of the sadest stories in the computing era of our day. needless to say it was brought to us by the kings of IT stupidity, Apple.

PCMCIA is not dead you fools but COM is & S-Vi

[gelfling]

And USB wireless NIC cards, are, to a man, each and every one of them, complete fucking shit. I have never had a functional USB wireless NIC - well I did have a Netgear WGT111 once and it overheated and melted in the first 45 minutes. The rest of them never worked AT ALL. In fact all the hosannahs for USB Uber Alles are, to put it mildly, smoking PCP.

Odd they didn't mention COM - other than industrial computers and embedded systems mounted on telephone poles, COM is useless - just use a USB to serial interfacer. And you know what IS dead or it should be? S-Video. That's one bullshit port.

Re: ST506

[Anonymous Coward]

How about a 14" 5 meg platter which mounted on a drive the size of a washing machine and pulled 25A @240V?

Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern RAID cages will accept both SATA and SAS drives in the same bays.

But only if you've got a big enough mallet for them to both fit.

Missing Option...

[CrazyTalk]

Where's HP-IB, aka GP-IB? I want somewhere to plug in my oscilloscope and hot wire anemometer!

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[lloyd_powell]

Yes, both these are timeless.

Obviousely some moderaters are missing that fact. *sigh*

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[lloyd_powell]

I just want to take this opportunity to complain that my karma is bad for no good reason. Yes, I can be a little blunt or flippint at times, but I want to be liked like everybody else.

Some moderates take pity on me please. Review all my previous ten posts and rank me up, or at least tell me why I deserved to be labelled 'bad'.

I'm not taking this to heart, at the same time I would like a little justice here.

And don't rank this down just because your feeling like a arsehole. I'm asking for an honest appraisal here.

Lloyd

Re:finger

[rnturn]

``I miss finger. ... I think I'll install fingerd on my WRT54G and stuff some random information into it, just for old time's sake.''

Anyone remember when you could get the latest information from Space News by fingering their site? I ran across a copy of an old crontab file sitting on a system that had an entry to finger for the latest launch news. If memory serves, it worked up until something like 4-5 years ago. I was a little bummed when it stopped working.

As for finger, I still use it at work (no, we're not running the daemon). Some folks at work have workstations that they leave turned on and stay logged into some of the servers for days and days. Finger is handy to find out whether they're are actually at their desk or not. For some reason, I still keep my ".plan" file reasonably up-to-date. I guess, in case someone runs across "finger" in the manpages.

Amen brother!

[DG]

Imagine my chagrin when a USB->serial adaptor didn't work on my AEM EMS (the fuel injection computer in my race car)

Imagine my fury when I bought a SocketSerial PCMCIA serial card instead - and discovered that the port in my brand-spanking-new laptop wasn't actually PCMCIA, but "ExpressCard"

DG