Top ten obsolete ports

AnonymousTue 25 March, 2008 2:19pm

Surely game cartridges are alive and well on the Nintendo DS?

I know they're officially called "cards", but we all know that they're just very very small game cartridges really.

AnonymousTue 25 March, 2008 5:33pm

the PS/2 connector/port looks suspiciously like ADP (Apple Desktop Port) or is it ADB (Apple Desktop Bus). They were used on the old OS 9 and earlier machines to connect keyboards and mice and sometimes printers.

Philip BainTue 25 March, 2008 8:24pm

I always solved the PCMCIA confusion by referring to the port as an "Amiga Slot" as later versions of Commodore's quite frankly excellent computer had a PCMCIA slot for expansion purposes. I think a better candidate than any of the ports featured in this article that you still get on computers today is the Serial Port (RS232), no one has used this port in well over a decade now, yet in most cases you will still get one!!

AnonymousWed 26 March, 2008 9:23am

i can admit firewire may be almost obsolete to the casual consumer, but you can't ignore it's prevalence in the music recording industry, in which it is essentially the standard for both audio interfaces and hard drives.

AnonymousWed 26 March, 2008 12:00pm

almost everyone working in digital video uses Firewire! USB can't match it for constant high-speed throughput. And Firewire 800 is faster still. USB is just a bit flakey for pro video.

AnonymousWed 26 March, 2008 12:06pm

USB will be obsolete before Firewire is. Consumers will happily switch to a new socket for their computers at some point, but pro audio and video users will keep Firewire going for decades. Professionals must support the incredibly expensive systems they have running through it, not to mention Firewire is a more reliable standard. Look at what happened with MIDI, we still use that interface too!

martinWed 26 March, 2008 1:50pm

Well done, this is surely the most obscurest 'top 10' youve produced so far. Im slightly concerned that serial ports did not make the grade, do you still fiddle around with com port settings to sync your PDA's (running off Windows CE of course) at CNET towers?

I would even go as far to suggest the good old RJ11 Modem port is going the way of the T-Rex. Many laptops are still equipped with this 56kbs beast but some such as Apple Macbooks and the Asus EeePC are doing away with these without complaint.

DavidRGilsonThu 27 March, 2008 6:18pm

Ian - interesting and entertaining - but you missed serial ports!

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 7:33pm

Well, my ABIT KV8-MAX3 mobo didnt have a parallel port -which I'd never given a second thought. Obtained an old parallel HP Laser printer from work.. had to buy a PCI parallel card. To my amazement - Vista Ultimate (64bit) happily found a driver on Windows Update!
I'm sure the new Dell Optiplex machines I set up at work are still shipping with Parallel and Serial ports. However, the aforementioned PS/2 ports have long gone!

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 9:49pm

Serial is nice for data acquisition. I still use it, two in fact, while firing pottery.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 9:54pm

Actually, most computers now days do NOT have a rs-232 serial port. And they are used extensively in engineering still.. it's an excellent way to debug boards. We are seeing USB-to-Serial drivers used lately though.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 9:57pm

The thing with FireWire is that it wasn't intended to compete with USB. USB 1 was only 11mbps and was designed to replace the old peripheral ports like Parallel, Serial, PS2, ADB for keyboards and mice and other relatively slow devices. FireWire was brought in to replace SCSI as a high speed port for external hard drives, camcorders, and other things that need speed. It has been, and still is, superior in that aspect to USB.

There's no need for FireWire keyboards & mice - they don't need to go that fast. So USB becomes more common, as it's "needed" even on low-end boxes. Cheap boxes can leave off firewire, and nobody in their right mind is going to build a firewire mouse.

So yes, USB is more common and popular than FireWire. That doesn't mean FireWire's dead. It's alive and well, and I'll take any FireWire hard drive over a USB one anyday!

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 9:58pm

You really need a reality check on firewire ports.

Pro video and audio systems use them as quite frankly usb sucks.
and for the mac users out there usb target mode anyone? (PCs really need to get a firewire target mode)

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:00pm

RS-232 ports are BY NO MEANS dead!

I happen to be using a few dozen of them THIS VERY MOMENT for a large scale storage systems testing.

good old 232 is still king when it comes to embedded devices!

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:10pm

Hmmm, I disagree with Firewire being obsolete. I just bought a new iMac with Firewire and I bought a brand new external hard drive with a 400 and 800 speed firewire ports. The reason I got a hard drive with firewire 800 is because its faster than USB 2.0. Considering Apple is gaining market share in the personal computer market, I think firewire may actually be gaining users. I'd also like to add, I'm not an apple fanboy. I've been working with PC's since DOS and I've worked with UNIX systems since the mid 90's. But I love my new iMac because its easier to use when I want it too be, but I can drop into a UNIX shell when I need to and get technical.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:10pm

<i>I know they're officially called "cards", but we all know that they're just very very small game cartridges really.</i>

Not really. The DS game cards just hold data, like a CD or DVD; the old cartridges actually were circuit boards, with different layouts for different games. Cartridges could add other chips for special effects (like the original <i>Starfox</i> did), unlike the current cartridges.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:11pm

Why isn't the RS232 on the list? Because it's a top ten list, not a bottom ten. Those of use who had to hook stuff up on a regular basis know and loath RS232 as the port of the beast. Unlike the parallel port, which would automatically go at the best speed, you have to manually set each side of a serial connection to get the speed -- and the handshaking -- and the bits -- and the stop bits -- oh, and don't forget that the computer and peripheral have to agree which is which. Otherwise the connection "doesn't work" and you have to try everything -- manually -- with no help from the computer or peripheral -- to make everything work.

They even have "breakout boxes" just so you can see what's happening on the wires so you have a chance of getting everything right. And special kits to jumper the wires around to make it easy to make a custom cable for what you're making.

Yuck. Good bye, and good ridance.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:13pm

since you listed IDE, i figured you could list "micro channel", now thats one obscure port/bus! Serial is still used, mostly in non computer applications as well network hardware for console connections and a few other systems, firewire i use daily and is far better than USB 2.0 for data transfers to an external storage device... and you missed COAX & token-ring network ports, both are very very dead

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:13pm

Firewire is also present on audio systems in home theater. HDMI is nice in that it passes audio and video, but firewire also passes control information. It is not highly prevalent but is definitely there. And as many have said, for pro audio/video NOBODY uses USB. Try sucking a HD stream off a real HD camera using USB... Not this time Mr. Bond...

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:30pm

I work in industrial automation and pretty much every device used in this field still has and uses an RS232 port. The USB->Serial adapters don't always work, we need the real deal on our work machines and pay a premium for it. As long as there are millions of devices out there using it, they'll still make them - good riddance indeed.

Even computing sites seem to have forgotten that computers are used for more than archiving family photos, downloading adult material and playing games. tsk.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:33pm

Better list than yours:

10. Parallel
9. RS232
8. HPIB / GPIB (another parallel port, look it up.)
9. PS/2
8. S-Video
7. PCMCIA
6. Floppy disk IF port
5. VGA
4. Game/joystick port
3. RJ-11 (for modem connections)
2. IrDA
1. CNET

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:37pm

Wow, what a worthless article. Just wow.

I could write an essay here but it's just not worth the time.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:37pm

Why is FireWire on there? FireWire is still alive and well where it's specs are put to use. It was never intended to replace USB. USB 3 still doesn't even meet the current FireWire specs for some important details that are used in the AV industry. One would have thought that a technology site would at least have people who are experts writing these kinds of things. And wireless, to replace FireWire!? Not anytime soon. FireWire will never be popular, but it still has its place for now.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:38pm

I thought firewire was making a comeback when the ipod first showed up. I actually went out to buy a firewire card since my PC only had USB 1.1 support. I figured the additional features of firewire trumped USB 2.0. I was so sad when apple nuked the firewire connectivity from the ipod to cut costs.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:41pm

I was secretly hoping to see Apple GeoPort, ST-506/ST-412, ESDI, and the DEC MMJ make the list.

Oh well...maybe next time!!

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:43pm

saying firewire is obsolete is like saying fast graphic cards are obsolete. the fact that something isn't sold in low-end PCs doesn't necessarily make it obsolete- USB isn't capable of reliable high-throughput data transfer, which is why firewire is the i/o port of choice for anyone who works with audio or video to the extent that nobody would ever consider using a usb drive. there's a huge and thriving market for 3rd-party firewire hardware, ranging from hard drives to audio interfaces to video digitizers to practically every digital video camera on the planet.

i know this is cnet and all, but c'mon- a little due diligence never killed anyone. and nobody's clicking on those banner ads, chief.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:48pm

"nobody's clicking on those banner ads, chief"

There's a banner ad?

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 10:50pm

i can think of a few more that are, or will soon be, no longer with us

10base-T
Token Ring
RS232
D-SUB
Floppy connector
IDE
Molex connectors
Joystick ports

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:01pm

PCMCIA = People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:01pm

PCMCIA -- Doesn't that stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms?

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:19pm

What a strange mind you have Mr. CNET...
Definitely some of the other suggestions were better.
Indeed: RJ11 for Modems, Joystick ports, RJ58 / BNC (in the context of Ethernet), IrDA would be jostle for the top spot on my list.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:21pm

I'm sorry to say this but you (cnet) are more obsolete than firewire will ever be. You guys obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

out, Leo

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:24pm

Nobody mentioned CENELEC (maybe it has another name). Every time I bought a printer they sold me a new cable "because they look alike but the old one may not work with your new (Selectric, daisy wheel, thermal -- pick your poison) printer"

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:38pm

Yes, it definitely would have been possible to come up with a better list than this.

To moan about the loss of the stunted and ill-conceived AGP slot while delighting in the slow and gentle expiration of ISA -- the "open" element more responsible than any other for the entire IBM PC clone phenomena and the technological well-spring of every PC made today -- is to entirely misrepresent and pervert the history of personal computers.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:48pm

mhhhh... while USB is most convenient, it still can beat firewire in speed.
I mostly use firewire to conect external HD, for video edition. USB still is not ready for that task, specially that we are now going HD. Trying to edit HD in and external drive with USB is asking for problems.

Theorically USB 400 should be the same speed as the standard firewire 400... but in the real world this does not happens.

I also use firewire for networking, which is very convenient when i need to trasnfer a lot of data between computers ( especially of HD video) .

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:51pm

RS232 is still in use. Anything A/V gear that is not being sold at your big box electronics store still has RS232 ports on their gear. I do integration and prefer these ports over network connections. Anyone that thinks 232 is dead, is really just ignorant. Just because you don't use a port, doesn't mean its dead.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:54pm

I must be getting seriously old, but what about fat Ethernet ports for the original 3 and 10MB Ethernet, complete with slide locks? Amazing that Ethernet ever took off, given the cruftiness of those initial connectors.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:54pm

I yearn for the death of USB. Parallel and PS2 were infinitely more stable... whenever possible I move away from USB at work where stability is a must. If the OS must recognize the device before I can use the port for output or input, it's not useful.

As for RS232, the USB converters do not work well and RS232 is very necessary for controlling devices such as industrial equipment and capturing information from devices such as scales.

AnonymousFri 28 March, 2008 11:57pm

RS232 is nowhere near dead. Take a look at industrial electronics. Modems, PLCs, radios and the like all still rely heavily on RS232/serial ports. It's easier to crimp a serial cable than it is a parallel or USB cable, imo, and I use it more often. It's also quite frustrating to try and find a notebook computer these days that has a serial port so I can use the thing for work.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:04am

SCART??? So ridiculous... in France we do not call this that way, but Peritel, just has something to plug any PERIpheric on your TELevision... Why the hell isn't it the same elsewhere?

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:05am

<Not really. The DS game cards just hold data, like a CD or DVD; the old cartridges actually were circuit boards, with different layouts for different games. Cartridges could add other chips for special effects (like the original <i>Starfox</i> did), unlike the current cartridges.>

Ah, but the DS has a Game Boy Advance card slot as well. GBA cards can extend the system by adding memory etc.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:08am

Heh, most retarded list ever. I love how you missed IDE, and still managed to tag the list with it. IDE if anything has become obsolete to SATA:

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:13am

I use and love FireWire too; for video transfer it can't be beat. But to use it for networking two PCs? You're better off using the - very likely - built in gigabit Ethernet...beats the tar out of anything else between two systems, and you don't even need to sort out cross-over vs. straight Ethernet cables with GigE.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:16am

rs232....as others here have pointed out..it's not going away because rs232 are still used in many, many old equipments...esp in Manufacturing....take a tour of your local manufacturing facility...esp ones that have large machines that make lots of noise....those ones that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace...that's how you talk to most of them...not as easy to "upgrade" those machines....

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:18am

Uh, perhaps because USB 2.0 has a theoretical limit of 480 MBits/s, not 400?

Also I disagree with the article's assertion that Scart connectors fall out of place easily, I've never seen that happen.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:21am

Photo 7 does not show an ISA bus card; it's the original PC, later PC/XT, bus. The 16 bit ISA was introduced in 1984 with the PC/AT.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:34am

Where are the audio interfaces that can do 24/192 with usb?

Calling firewire dead is like calling midi dead. 95% of people don't need it but for some it can not be replaced easily.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:35am

Firewire. Obsolete? RS-232. Obsolete? AGP. Obsolete?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Here's some truely obsolete ports:
MFM/RLL HD (Pre-IDE wintel standard HD interface)
Floppy drive
BNC (for networking, BNC is still prevalent in many other industries)
CGA (the great-gandparent of VGA)
9 pin joystick
3D/video card to VGA graphics card patch cable
IBM PC keyboard (the large one, not the PS/2 connector. Most new PCs still ship with PS/2)

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:36am

SCSI device IDs are better than the stupid slave/master molex pins & 2-device limit of IDE.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:38am

I'm sure this is an interesting story, but I can't be bothered to click through to 10 separate pages to read it. CNet should have a "single page" option.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 12:58am

I don't know how you can call SCSI obsolete... It's virtually impossible to build a server without SCSI.

High-end storage is still SCSI, it's just gone serial like ATA did. Every server I've built in the last year has had SAS controllers and drives. And usually an old-school parallel SCSI controller to push a tape drive of some sort.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 1:54am

Scart? Never heard of it... Sorry, I'm on the other side of the pond...

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 2:03am

I don't think that Kryten's groin should be listed here mainly because the 2X4B-523P was never marketed well Come on now, how many of you out there ran right out and purchased one? Other than Dave Lister, does anyone know someone who had one? Do you know anyone who still has a working model? Although shown on TV, did you ever see one in a store? I call it VAPORWARE!

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 2:37am

Firewire obsolete huh? It isn't just on Macs either, lots of PC laptops have them too, mine does, except on the PC it's called IEEE-1394.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 2:48am

PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports are 100% inter-changeable. There is no real requirement to match the colors, unless you're a perfectionist.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 3:19am

When I was in high-school, I dropped a TV from a cart. The TV had a SCART running to a VCR, also on the cart. The SCART connector didn't disconnect, the circuit board was ripped apart instead.

The connector sucks though; the shielding is fragile, the cables are a rip-off and the automatic switching doesn't work properly.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 3:30am

PCMCIA : People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 3:40am

firewire's not dead!!

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 4:05am

20 mA current loop
ST-506
SMD
AMP token-ring
vampire tap
AAUI
DRV-11
13W3
RS-485
HP-HIL
NTSC - Never Twice the Same Color

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 4:11am

Apple Woz Machine Floppy Interface

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 4:15am

the notion that infiniband will replace scsi is humorous given infiniband is almost dead now that fcoe is the new buzzword in the data centre. plus fcoe will be much easier to drop into a consumer device as it's just ethernet - 10gig perhaps, but still ethernet ...

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 4:34am

I might agree with half of these. They all have very different applications.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 4:45am

For those that think USB is 480 MBits/s, that is the burst rate, not the sustained. In all of my testing I have yet to see a USB interface keep up with a firewire transfer. I gave up on USB 2.0 a long time ago.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 5:40am

I think of the ten you list perhaps as many as five of them have actually fallen out of widespread use. A couple of them *glaringly* don't belong on the list.

Firewire hasn't declined at all; it just never really caught on in the first place (with ordinary users; yes, I know it thrives in a couple of niches). If anything, it seems to be _slightly_ on the increase on the PC side, though it's clearly not going to replace to USB in the immediate future. SCSI never caught on for most people because the drives were so much more expensive than IDE, for lower capacity. If you're going to include things that never really became popular in the first place, why not AMR? (Yeah, a lot of motherboards _had_ that BUS for a while, but did you ever see anything plugged into one?) Or MCA for that matter -- it's not significantly older than IDE.

PS/2 is an even stranger thing to include. It's only obsolete in the sense that it's been around for a while and there are newer kinds of connectors, not in the sense that the newer connectors are a significant improvement or more widely used. I think PS/2 keyboards and mice have been replaced with USB ones on perhaps as many as 0.05% of all PCs. For a short while circa 2002 it was actually possible to buy "legacy-free" PCs without PS/2 ports, mostly from Compaq, but I haven't seen one for sale since Windows XP was released, so I'm pretty sure that failed to catch on. (USB keyboards and mice _have_ completely replaced ADB models on Macs, but you didn't mention ADB.)

Besides ADB, I'd nominate BNC, which at one point was almost as common as RJ45 but seems to have completely disappeared sometime in the mid nineties. The old Mac serial and printer ports are obvious candidates as well.

RS232 serial ports were much more widely used in their heyday than parallel printer ports were, and are much _less_ widely used now. (Where I work, we still have more parallel printers than USB ones. Granted, most of the parallel printers are laser printers, which last longer than inkjets and are less common in home settings. The printer we use most connects to the network via RJ45, which is becoming very common in work environments these days, albeit not so much in home settings.)

I think of all the ones you list the one I bemoan the loss of most is IDE. Say what you will about IDE, and yeah, I had my share of frustrations with it over the years, and jumpers were a pain, and all that, but you know it actually _worked_, and you didn't have to worry about whether an OS installer was going to be able to see the drive to install on it. SATA makes me want to tear my hair out sometimes. I think the blame there lies on BIOS makers, but nonetheless.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 6:04am

It really sucks new iPods don't work with Firewire, and it's nigh impossible to find a nice PC with Firewire. Everyone would be using Firewire if Apple didn't switch iPods from Firewire to USB. I bought a PCI Firewire adapter for my 90s model Dell and it was like most awesome upgrade I ever had on any computer as far as an improvement for dollars spent. That's one thing I actually used my PCMCIA slot for constantly with my notebook - Firewire adapter. Transfers to my external HDD and iPod via my Pentium III desktop seemed much faster and smoother compared to my modern Thinkpad with 2 gigs of RAM and USB 2. USB blows goats.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 6:26am

My experience with ports and connectors is one of the few things that really conforms to the idea of smooth human progress towards a better world. The old days... *shudder*

It's baffling that some commenters don't think PS/2 is obsolete. It's not like it's easy to find a PS/2 mouse or keyboard these days. PS/2 ports were terrible; plugging in a keyboard or mouse while the computer was running was a good way to freeze your system. What a ludicrous shortcoming for such simple devices! I'm surprised PS/2 survived into the 21st century.

USB does a wonderful job of "just working" if the computer recognizes the device and not crashing the system if the computer doesn't. It's quite an advance over the old days where connecting to a piece of hardware meant one of two things:

1) Possibility one: The OS made no attempt to recognize the connected device. You had no idea whether the device was connected or what settings it wanted to talk at, and you sent data off into the aether with the vague hope that something on the other end might be able to understand it (*cough* serial *cough*).

(Aside: Of course engineers love serial ports. They are on intimate terms with the devices on either end of the cable, and if they won't talk to each other, the engineer can talk to each device separately and patch up the problem. For consumers, it was hell. Especially when you knew nothing about serial port settings and had to translate between the language in the device manual and the language in the software that was configuring the port. ("The manual says I have to use XON/XOFF flow control, but this stupid program doesn't say anything about XON or XOFF. ARRRRGH!") Now I too am initiated into the ways of serial ports, but I'm appalled that they were ever used for consumer devices.)

2) Second possibility: The OS tried to recognize the device and played Russian roulette if it didn't.

I don't know how we lived through those times without giving up and going outside to play sports. Low expectations, I guess.

The only exception to this positive trend is USB/serial connectors. They don't work. At all. Seriously, I've bought at least three, and they've all made Windows XP (a pretty darned stable OS) incredibly crash-prone, even using drivers straight from the manufacturer. Is there some reasonable excuse for the universal suckage of USB/serial converters? I'd love to hear it. Fortunately, makers of embedded devices are starting to provide USB connections where previously there was only serial.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 6:41am

I wonder why parallel is on that list. With all those matrix printers still in use and sold every day to businesses, as well as Windows software which, for obvious reasons, does not use the Windows printer drivers, I don't see a near end for parallel. Maybe the only threat to parallel could be networked printers, as they have propper operating system support (you can make them have lpt-device names) and they have practical advantages over parallel.

Same is with PS/2. If you are lucky your application runs under a version of Windows which supports USB. Otherwise you are out of luck. Some special keyboards are _only_ availiable with PS/2 connectors and will not even work with PS/2->USB converters.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 9:42am

I'm not sure what drugs you have to be on to be allowed to author articles for CNET, but I guess they must be strong. And reality altering.

Very strong indeed.

FireWire is in use on ALL professional vide cameras andif you want data streaming to an external hard drive, well, try that on a busy machine with USB.

And ISA ? AGP ? SCSI ? Are you (the author) daft, or just a flaming idiot ? A port and a BUS are absolutely not the same things and should NOT be mixed like friggin crackers in a conversation.

I recommend that you (the author) take basic computing 101 again. Twice. And stop writing, until you at least have half a bloody clue what it is your'e writing about.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 9:45am

Agree that mr CNET is a dumbass mainly for the reason you declare SCSI obsolete. Sure new low/mid range servers incorporate SATA (yet fail to pass the cost savings along), but for the high end enterprise gear such as EMC (proprietary) and your DELLs, HP's etc SCSI (LVD) is the interface of choice. Its one of the most versatile ports (incorporating power) as opposed the weak SATA port.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 10:32am

Wow! What a dross article .. seems to have been written by someone who has been in the IT industry for the grand total of 3 weeks and thinks Wikipedia can make up for there shortcomings ... ho hum! I just wish C-net didn't always pop up whenever I want a review of some kit ... hardly ever actually have the review and when they do it's a little thin. :-(

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 11:42am

Serial is still used for far more than you think. There are many devices that people depend on daily that use serial and ONLY serial to communicate. Of course these devices have a planned lifetime of many years so they are slower to upgrade than consumer electronics, but they are depened on for peoples very lives in many applications.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 3:10pm

Wow... After reading all the comments, I should point some things out.

The author has failed to define "obsolete". And, after reading the whole article, I am still not sure what he meant by that term.

If, by obsolete, he means "widely used in consumer devices and applications", I could sort of agree with almost the entire article. Parallel, Serial and PS/2 have been successfully replaced by USB, which is very good for that, IMHO.

Maybe the author has not considered that some consumers are "semi-pros", and that these are not really a niche market; they are more common than one might think. That said, Firewire (or i.Link or IEEE-1394) is still kicking some serious butt out there!

Now, for the readers that are saying RS-232 is not dead, I can agree and disagree, depending on the point of view. In industry, there's no better way to network PLC's than RS-485. To connect peripherals (printers, scales, barcode scanners, etc.) to these very same PLC's, RS-232 works like a champ! But I agree that this is a very specialized market, which most consumers don't even know it exists.

So, my conslusion is: the article is not totally stupid; it's just badly written. If the author made the rules more clear, maybe we could be a little more supportive of his work. Still, the way it is, I'd call it rubbish.

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 5:54pm

Ummm... for ISA you show an 8-bit ISA card... when those things were in use, the Internet wasn't even in use yet by the mainstream population! Drivers from the internet??? HA! try an old-school floppy! Not even a DVD... and THEN you had to worry about IRQ hell...

AnonymousSat 29 March, 2008 10:54pm

In Spain we call the Scart/Peritel connector "Euroconector".

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 12:59am

PS/2 isn't dead either. It won't be until my PC works on boot with my USB keyboard. I can't get into the BIOS with the USB keyboard, I need a PS2 keyboard

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 5:39am

+1 on the FireWire is not dead brigade!
FireWire 800 is MUCH MUCH faster than USB 2. In fact eSATA is the only thing that can take it on. It's clearly not obsolete.

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 5:51am

Firstly, USB only took off ahead of Firewire because it was cheap. Not because it was better.

If it's obsolete, how come $10k HD video cameras ONLY have firewire ports on them? Oh, wait, because USB could never go fast enough to get the video over in anything approximating realtime.

And these days, nearly every PC has FireWire too. It's not going to be on the verge of demise when USB gets faster, because, as you may not have guessed, FireWire will also have future revisions. It already jumped from FireWire 400 to 800 (twice as fast), and there's a third revision just around the corner.

SCSI, maybe, as the old 25/50 pin SCSI port. But as SAS, it's more than alive, and seriously fast! And it also lives on ATAPI (ATA packet interface, i.e. SCSI over IDE). Sound familiar? It's in just about every laptop made - to connect the optical drive up.

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 6:01am

ps2 ports are NOT obsolete. In the coporate world, most servers I know of have ps2 ports for mouse and keyboard. Often will be connected to KVM switch boxes. I know there are usb switch boxes, but ps2 ports for mouse and keyboad are far from dead. Also serial still used on servers to connect to routers and switches. As far as I know, Cisoc switches and routers still need the serial ports to connect to to manage the device. Is called a console port and connectss to serial port, NOT usb.

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 7:03pm

PS2 is used in KVM and is not obsolete.
VGA is not obsolete. I heard someone earlier say it was. They are an idiot. It is used almost everywhere.
Serial is not obsolete. It is used by retro gamers, engineers, amateur robotics, and in heavy industry. LPT definitely is obsulete.
I can't stand SCART. The cables *do* constantly fall out, they are hard to put in and the pins are fragile as hell.
Firewire was only ever used by a niche market. It would have done better if Apple had made iPods use it.
Here's a truly obsolete format: USB1.1.

Just my 2 cents.

AnonymousSun 30 March, 2008 10:39pm

Well, there's the reason they're claiming Firewire's obsolete... If they have to include Kryton's Groin Socket and game cartridges, they're stretching to find 7 obsolete ports, let alone 10. Eyes rolled, breath sucked, head shaken, I move on. Crave now unsubscribed.

AnonymousMon 31 March, 2008 6:46am

"Serial is not obsolete. It is used by retro gamers"
had to laugh at that! by definition retro gaming IS obsolete.

AnonymousMon 31 March, 2008 12:31pm

FireWire shouldn't be listed as anything close to obsolete on a site which dubs itself as 'expert tech reviews.' That's completely silly. Pro audio/video heavily use it. It's also popular in various prosumer markets for external drives that are much faster than usb, while still more 'portable' than esata.

SCSI as a 'port' I will agree with. But one cannot mention SCSI being obsolete without mentioning Serially Attached SCSI. In high-performance situations SAS is what replaces the old SCSI interface.

PCMCIA is similar to SCSI. It is an obsolete port, but not only because of USB, ExpressCard had a major role in PCMCIA's phase-out.

Personally, I feel that the 3 points above are too glaring for me to bother listing 'ports' which are more obsolete than some in this post...

AnonymousMon 31 March, 2008 8:43pm

Ok, this is the stupidest article I've read in a long time. I still use every single port listed except Scart, which I've never seen, and Kryten's groin which is just plain garbage. I won't even get started in ISA. This entire article is a waste of time to read.

AnonymousThu 3 April, 2008 12:22am

SCART is crap as the wire is so thick and heavy it pulls it self out over time. Its still not out of use, its still going. HDMI is good but we are still a fair few years away before we are all on digital TVs due to CRT being much cheaper and in many cases a sharper picture.

AnonymousWed 9 April, 2008 3:15pm

I think the writer of this article needs to research the acctual meaning of the word 'obsolete' as most of the 'ports' described here are still both in use and being manufactured.

AnonymousThu 10 April, 2008 1:35pm

That PS/2 port was the worst in the world the pins to connect the keyboard or mouse used to either get bent or break too easily wen your in a hurry to set up, i managed to go through a few keyboards and had some frustrating days as a result of that fiddle thing

AnonymousWed 23 April, 2008 1:19pm

Serial Ports... out of date??? NEVER! .. Point of Service machines use them around the world EVERY day. And they are great for the hobiest programmer!