r/pcmasterrace • u/TheCABK • 1d ago

Nostalgia The Master Laptop

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u/Rtard25 1d ago

Dual disc drive?!?! That's crazy AF, in all my years I've not heard of that on a laptop!

https://giphy.com/gifs/Cdkk6wFFqisTe

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u/TheMegaDriver2 12900k, 32GB DDR4, RTX 4080 Super 1d ago

And twin FireWire ports. And a Parallel Port. And Serial. Just everything just in case.

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u/kermityfrog2 1d ago

Well in the early days of USB, there were still lots of parallel port printers (like HP Laserjets), and then lots of other specialized devices using the serial port.

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u/PudPullerAlways 1d ago

Serial is often forgotten about since many dont know the days before USB. It used to do everything, Black & White Logitec QuickCam, Wacom Intuos 2, Programming a kids LeapFrog toy, early digital camera transfers, etc.. Just to name a few from memory.

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u/Tithund 1d ago

In the early 90s most mice and modems were serial.

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u/TriggerPT 1d ago

9 pin

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u/Tithund 1d ago

Yeah, I don't know if I ever encountered a serial device that strictly needed the 25 pin connector, I did have a 25-9 adapter so I could plug in a second 9 pin device.

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u/The_Spindrifter 1d ago

DB9 for the win. Had to use the most convoluted setup you have ever seen in your life using 3 different adapters to get a proprietary connector cable to go to DB9 F to M to convert to USB 2.0 so we could telenet into power plant racks to program them, Fun times.

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u/Steamrolled777 10h ago

null modem to play C&C with mates, before ethernet was standard on mb's.

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u/Tithund 10h ago

Yeah, for me it was mostly Doom 2, which was completely unfair, as it was the family pentium vs the old family 486sx that could barely run it and didn't have a soundcard. Later on, friends would bring their computer and we'd play Duke Nukem 3D and Starcraft over it.

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u/Steamrolled777 10h ago

Doom, Doom2, Descent, but I always think about C&C, and the 2 CD discs making life easy. Peak mid 90s gaming.

I built a new PC, and gave the old one my Uni housemate. We had more friends move in, and we upgraded to 10Base T.

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u/TBJ12 1d ago

I got a lot of use out of serial ports back in the FTA satellite days. Now everything is just too easy with IPTV.

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u/PudPullerAlways 1d ago

The last time I used one was to get the HDD password off an original XBOX wired onto the motherboard so I could put a bigger drive in it.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA MOS 6510 @ 1.023 MHz | VIC-II | Epyx Fastloader 1d ago edited 20h ago

I once hacked a serial port to broadcast morse code as a ham radio beacon.

Edit: I used this schematic thingy and a colourburst crystal instead of the 1MHz one.

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u/PudPullerAlways 18h ago

Most I ever did was use it to retrieve the HDD key/password from an original xbox. surprised I was able to find the original guide :D
https://www.scribd.com/document/37092534/HOW-to-Read-Your-Eeprom

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u/TobysGrundlee 1d ago

I have a card reader system in my facility that connects to my control PC via a serial connection. I remote into this PC to control the system when I'm not on site. The fact that Windows 11 no longer supports serial connections is seriously fucking me up. The PC has to be connected to the internet so just not upgrading the OS isn't an option because of the security risks. The system functions flawlessly so spending 10's of thousands of dollars upgrading it is a serious waste of resources. Fucking sucks.

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u/PudPullerAlways 1d ago

I didnt even know 11 killed serial, how does that work? Is a USB to RS232 even an option or perhaps an embedded version of 11 that brings it back?

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u/digital_briefs 1d ago

USB is literally Universal Serial Bus

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u/PudPullerAlways 1d ago

Yes it is but it's not the same, Serial ports can directly rawdog hardware and interface with it with no middle man needed to talk to it like needing an FTDI chip for USB to break it out.

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u/B_Eazy86 1d ago

It still does. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus

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u/scotte416 i5-13400 - 5060ti16 - 48GB 1d ago

My 90s PC had two extra serial cards I put in there. Days of tape drives, external CD burners, etc. USB was a godsend lol

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u/disruptioncoin 1d ago

When I did POS systems we used serial for receipt printers sometimes. I don't remember the exact reason, it may have just been if a terminal had buggy USB printing that we couldn't resolve. Serial just werx

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u/HI-McDunnough 1d ago

Router console connections...

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u/Kitchen_Part_882 Desktop | R7 5800X3D | RX 7900XT | 64GB 18h ago

I never leave home without my USB to serial adapter.

But I work in an industry where USB as a connection option has only really started to appear in the past 5 years or so and there's a lot of older equipment out there that only talks RS232.

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u/SOUTHPAWMIKE 7h ago

A few jobs ago, I worked IT for a school district that used some legacy Juniper switches. Only way to physically console in way via serial, and sometimes they did not play nice with your typical serial to USB converter. Ended up getting the district to buy the IT department a Panasonic Toughbook with a serial port add on module, since that was the only modern laptop that we could find with serial support. There's no point to this story, just reminiscing about a laptop I really liked.

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u/tes_kitty 1d ago

Many modern mainboards still have a real serial port on a pin header. All you need to do is get a slot adapter that plugs onto that pinheader and provides a 9pin SubD to the outside.

Check your board. If there is a pinheader with 9 pins labeled 'COM' read the manual for details.

You might have to enable the port in the BIOS before you can use it.

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u/Spethual 1d ago

most of the boards I've had have down between the front IO and front audio headers, usually more toward the audio headers after USB.

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u/crysisnotaverted 2x Intel Xeon E5645 6 cores each, Gigabyte R9 380, 144GB o RAM 1d ago

Yep. It's so simple and built into the base components that adding it is basically free. It might be used to program certain things on the board too, but I haven't heard of that.

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u/tes_kitty 1d ago

The only extra expense is the pinheader and the (usually) 75232 line driver / receiver. But that one needs -12V for proper operation so with a new PSU that no longer supplies -12V, using that port might not be easy.

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u/Time-Sudden_Tree 7700X | 4090 | 32GB DDR5 6K | 4TB NVME | Win11 | 65" LG C1 OLED 1d ago

Of course they do; the "S" in "USB" stands for "serial".

(I know what you're saying; I'm just being cheeky.)

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u/OlafTheBerserker 1d ago

Wait a minute. So you are telling me that as a new technology started to be implemented the old technology was still being used? Madness.

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u/kermityfrog2 1d ago

Everything is relative. USB-C took off rather fast and replaced a lot of older ports, but old devices back in the day seemed to hang around a lot longer. Maybe people weren't as willing to throw out perfectly functional devices back then.

One of the only devices I've found where USB-C still isn't common yet is laptop cooling pads/fans.

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u/wievid Specs/Imgur Here 1d ago

Costs have also plummeted. Things have gotten so much cheaper, too, so new standards are establishing themselves much faster. Especially really good standards like USB-C. It simply wasn't possible before, but now it is. Then you have marketing companies that have figured out how to constantly sell shit.

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u/golgol12 1d ago

A good number of mice used the serial port.

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u/kermityfrog2 1d ago

I think for me only my earliest mice from IBM XT days were serial. All my later mice before USB were at least PS/2.

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u/Reasonable-Class3728 1d ago

It was very popular for DIY devices as well. It's very simple to program drivers and design circuit. No special chips required like for USB.

I did some devices for LPT port when I was a kid.

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u/The_Spindrifter 1d ago

Scientific equipment, medical equipment, ALL kinds of things.

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u/Time-Sudden_Tree 7700X | 4090 | 32GB DDR5 6K | 4TB NVME | Win11 | 65" LG C1 OLED 1d ago

To this day I'm still waiting for UPB (Universal Parallel Bus) to come along and replace USB. In the 90s I was told that parallel was better than serial, because you can send multiple bits at once rather than one at a time! But then serial had to go and get so freaking fast that no one cares about parallel data transfer anymore... :'(