> Seems to me I read somewhere that Serial & Parallel ports are on
> the way out. Once that happens, won't current DOS based
> applications be toast? Hard to imagine anyone buying a new
> computer going to the bother of adding a serial/parallel card.
It is true that some motherboards are "legacy free". I have seen
designs that omit the parallel port. Perhaps the day is coming
where there will be no serial ports (other than USB) and no
parallel ports.
And an operating system that doesn't support the timing engine
behind sending CW.
Well, there wll always be $50 computers available with old Pentiums
in them that run DOS with their tiny 6 GB disks. This is a pretty
small price to pay.
I imagine a great product would be a PCI plug-in card that supports
serial and paralel ports. I would imagine such a card would cost
about $20. Instant legacy support. You can buy two of them and
have 4 serial ports and two parallel ports.
Having a DOS partition on your drive using one of the available
methods of having multi-operating system boot options would
solve the problem. Heck, you can throw your old IDE drive on the
bus - boot off of a floppy and then switch to the hard drive and
be all set. You probably wanted to put that drive in there anyway
so you had your old files available.
I haven't seen a radio yet that supports a USB connector! Perhaps
we can learn to send CW over a game port as a compromise if the
parallel port is history.
It will all work out - at least for another 15 or 20 years.
I am still recovering from the shock of buying a 1.7 GHz system
minus monitor for less than a kilobuck. At least I get my wife's
old system out of the deal - which will become my new TR Log
computer for another 5 years. The darn battery stopped keeping
the clock up on my old 486DX66 machine. I'll probably put that
one out in the barn - to use just for antenna design or something.
Tree
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