Blast from the past

Ron Anders

Y'all still have serial ports on pcs over there, like rs-232 type?

Nelek

Do not forget to make an *.iso of that CD, this way you won't run in the same problem again (at least not with that software / drivers)

M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

charlieg

A long time ago, I wanted to download some software bad had thought I needed to burn it on a CD or DVD. My boss looked at me (he was a good boss, and still is) with that look and held up an 8GB USB drive. Enter the stupid zone. Nevertheless, I have no lock on stupid, but I was the local consultant. I had no patience for wasting time, especially on stupid or IT. So, I had this collection of CD and DVD external drives in my drawer. You had to have the ejectables so the stupid small discs could be mounted. Years later, I have about 1/2 dozen of these things floating around. I'm cleaning out my office - if you are interested, all you have to do is pay shipping :)

Charlie Gilley “Microsoft is the virus..." "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

Christian Graus

I have one of those flying around. For ages after CDs stopped, I used to MP3 all the CDs I bought. Which sold a few portable hard drives back in the day

Alister Morton

I bought a USB CD drive for exactly that reason a couple of years ago; needed to load something ancient. More recently, I bought a USB 3 1/2" drive, too, for a similar reason.

Alister Morton

You wouldn't believe the amount of A/V equipment that is still controllable over a serial cable. It works over long distances under harsh condition, I guess, especially if you can do a 232 -> 422/485 -> 232 conversion. That differential serial runs over great distances.

trønderen

3-4 years ago, I ran into a need for hooking up some old RS-232 equipment to my PC. Problem was that I couldn't find the socket. Not here, not there. I finally dug out the handbook that came with the motherboard: It claimed that it had RS-232 support. I found the header on the motherboard, too, and and old bracket with a 9-pin socket that fit. So I did succeed. Yet, I was truly surprised: The PC was more than two years old at the time. For more than two years, I never noticed that it didn't have an RS-232 socket. If you had asked me during that period, I would have answered "Of course I have an RS-232 socket!" When I discovered the truth, I made the obvious conclusion: RS-232 is dead. Maybe not for special purpose use (like the 8051 CPU, which is still used for special purposes - those two fall in the same category), but for ordinary home/office PCs, it is dead. On the other hand: To me, CDs are not dead. I still buy music on CD. One of the record companies in Norway obtained the rights to a lot of old recordings, and released a new label called "Norwegian Album Classics", publishing a lot of old vinyl albums, never before available in a digital format. Half of the "Album Classics" I buy, I already have on vinyl, but the record was so worn out that when I digitized it myself, the sound quality was just terrible. Now I have lots of the music from my younger years in better quality than ever on a vinyl record. For those saying "Why not use streaming services?": First, most of this music was never available on streaming services. Second: When I pick music from my own record collection, I do not reveal any information about my listening habits. Not using streaming services is one of my principles for protecting my privacy.

Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.

Roger Wright

My last two laptops came with no Ethernet port and no CD/DVD player! When I'm working on a vehicle under a borrowed shade tree, I need a laptop to read the shop manuals!

Will Rogers never met me.

Sander Rossel

Alister Morton wrote:

More recently, I bought a USB 3 1/2" drive, too, for a similar reason.

Would whatever's on that 3 1/2" still run though? :omg:

Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript

Alister Morton

FWIR it wasn't an executable I needed to load from floppy, it was some other data. That said, I do have some operating system disks for a Strand GSX lighting console which should still run, as the hardware is frozen in time.