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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 The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a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."
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.
This is going to sound really strange, but I always found that licking the connectors solved most of my problems.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
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.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
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.
;) CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs use it.
* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI
* 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.
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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.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Where's the love?
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.
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. ;)
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.
If you can read this you've gone too far.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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