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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 The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a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."
C-net couldn't find an obsolete port with two hands, a map and a flashlight.
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.
Although I've still had to use it in the last couple years for a couple of odd routers.
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Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Netcraft confirmed their obsoletism years ago.
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.
The MS-DOS port of "Mortal Kombat" comes to mind...
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"
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
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
if you think dial up modems are obsolete, you evidently have never lived in a rural area in north america.
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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!
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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.
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.
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.
Where's the love?
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.
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.
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
I can't be the only one who found it poignant!
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.
Which is, considering there's about eight people living in rural north america, a very likely option.
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. ;)
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.
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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.
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E pluribus sanguinem
...who saw the headline and though the article would be a list of ports like 23 (tcp) and 117 (uucp)?
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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.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
RS
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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.
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