On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:54:00 -0400, clare wrote:
They are never going to use them again, but I have a large pile of them
I can't throw out either. The two computers I just checked don't even
have a 25 pin port.
Most don't even have a 9 pin RS232 or a 25 pin parallel port.
The flavour of the day is USB on personal computers, with some Serial
Attached Scsi (SAS) on workstation and server apps.

My elderly IC programmer/reader still uses RS-232 for data transfer to
the host machine, and I've used RS-232 a few times for data recovery work
in recent years where it's easier to hook vintage hardware up to a more
modern PC via serial than it is to access old media directly on the PC.
I've got a handful of "modern-ish" PCs stockpiled which have serial (and
parallel) ports on them.

I've never been a big fan of USB - it's just too quirky and over-
complicated for anything that doesn't *need* a high transfer speed.

Sadly it's getting hard to find a lot of this kind of stuff these days

cheers

Jules