this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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This is a great explanation!
But I do have to say, you darn kids with your fancy newfangled PS/2 input.. in my days we had proper serial or DIN ports!
I saw a computer with a parallel port at work the other day.
No idea why it had it, it also had a couple blue USB3 ports. Also VGA and HDMI, and a bicolour PS/2. Damn weird mainboard.
Zoomer intern was wondering what it was and I got to tell him about parallel and serial and all that. Made me feel nostalgic. And old.
"Work" computers will often have legacy ports because maybe you need it to connect to some old printer.
There are a lot of places still using old-style dot matrix printers or other weird old hardware. Point-of-sale systems made to this day often come with a bunch of serial, or not quite serial, ports.
Maybe it was even a 25 pin delta serial? or an external scsi port? Sounds damn peculiar indeed.
No, it's been a while since I last saw a SCSI connector of any kind, and I don't think I've ever seen a 25 pin serial (my first PC did have the 15 pin game port, though, if I recall correctly); this one was a plain old parallel port, though. Even had a small drawing of a printer on top of it on the i/o shield.
OMG, that reminds of one of my first little hobby projects. Using a serial port to light up an LED whenever I had a new notification on... good grief was it Myspace or Facebook back then? Around that transition period at any rate.