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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 The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a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."
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
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.
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).
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.
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
That one's true though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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...
- I'd prefer not to.
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.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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?
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