Re: Airport cards for G3 iMac - is someone joking on price?

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:48:35 +0100, steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (SteveH)
wrote:


Hardly anything except Macintoshes had USB back then. PCs were
struggling along with those ridiculous parallel ports for another five
years. Macs were way ahead of the curve as usual.

But still can't seem to use many USB cam's and WiFi devices for some
reason?

Lazy firmware programming. There are industry accepted standard
protocols for this kind of stuff. If a device needs a driver disc these
days, then someone has been lazy or is deliberately making proprietory
hardware.

I don't care *why* Steve, I just know how it is.

And how would you directly connect your parallel-less Mac to a
parallel only and perfectly useable HPLJ4 etc?

Jet direct ethernet thingie, I think.

"Directly connect" 'parallel only' ...

Or an ethernet to parallel print server box - about 20 quid these days.

More junk to buy and have kicking about to overcome a limitation.

*We* still have the choice ... built in ... (well, just about [1]) ;-)

As you rightly observe, hardly any 'Windows' machine comes with parallel
these days -

I'd have to disagree Steve. EVERY PC I built comes with a parallel
port (some are only coming with 1 serial on a flying cable though) and
most I have seen (like the IBM / Lenovo's) still have parallel built
in.

and you'd really struggle to find a modern printer with a
parallel interface.

Agreed. But there are still millions of very hard working and
expensive parallel only laser printers and big industrial laser
copiers out there and folk don't want to dump them for the sake of not
having a simple parallel interface.

And Appletalk / LocalTalk as nice and universal wasn't it.

Nothing was universal in those days. Think about how many different
networking standards and protocols there were.

Em, connecting ordinary Mainframes / Minis / PC's you mean? Ethernet /
Token Ring / Arcnet / FDDI but mainly the first TWO?

Token Ring, anyone?

Yep, had it here in my Netware 3.12 server and a STP MSAU. It was
easier to get a TR card for ISA / LB / EISA / PCI busses than any of
the numerous Apple ones though?

I think
Dads' old AppleWriter is currently languishing in his garage because
even his eMac wouldn't talk to it? Could have talked to it via serial
I suppose (does the eMac have a serial interface) and that's always
nice and easy to wire up isn't it?

But an Applewriter is ancient.

But potentially still a good printer?

You could probably do something with a
USB to serial adaptor, though.

More adaptors .. why?

But that would be equally true of a
modern Windows box that didn't come with parallel as standard.

See above and a PCI > Parallel card (that goes inside and works
automatically) is a tenner?

Centronics interface, plug it in yer Mini Computer, SPARC, PC, Atari
and I dare say many others, what 'else' used LocalTalk?

If you were *really* lucky, you'd be able to find a driver for it, too.

Eh. No more difficult than any USB one?

Printing graphics was pretty much out of the question in a lot of cases,
'cos you could just about get the printer to output text with a generic
driver, but graphics was another matter.

Been off world long Steve? Oh, you are thinking about Dot-Matrix ! ;-)
[1]

Parallel interfaces were horrible, outdated things by the late 90s, why
anyone would be wanting them 10 years later, I'll never fully
understand.

Because they were an industry standard (Centronics) and worked.

As for Localtalk - see above ref: networking protocols and hardware.

Exactly.

Oh, and what about all the millions of machines that are still running
DOS based apps and don't have the ability to support cheap nasty GDI
printers? No USB, LocalTalk, SCSI or networking, just a cheap (nearly
universal DB25M > C36M IEEE 1284 / Centronics) cable, sorted. ;-)

All the best ..

T i m


[1] Funnily enough I was clearing out today and came across some old
lineprinter 'graphics' output (when they make up a picture with ASCII
chrs etc). 6' of fanfold of Snoopy calendars etc. ;-)



.

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