I got that reference. Fuck, I’m old.
Please explain? I get that the chubby bird is speaking assembly, but I’m sure there’s more to it than that?
PS2 keyboards use interrupts rather than polling in USB, meaning every time a key is pressed the CPU stops what its doing to process it.
Cool! I had no idea it was deeper than just a physical interface change.
I didn’t know the PS2 had a keyboard
I know you’re probably being facetious… but the PS/2 port is what’s shown in the OP image.
that said the Playstation 2 had USB ports, you could just plug a regular keyboard into it
And having to pick your IRQ when installing anything into your machine, and the weird bugs that could happen if you mucked it up.
I remember manually programming the cylinders and heads on a hdd into the bios. Kids these days got it easy
Keyboard slows down the CPU because it gets priority over whatever the CPU is working on so the keyboard could cause your system to lag.
Back then all we had was single core CPUs.
Markiplier farquad hybrid deep fried meme
I’m this old
DB9 is still used on for MIDI on electronic instruments, though some manufacturers are moving to doing it with a TRS 3.5mm plug since it only uses 3 pins.
I had a mouse that plugged into the serial port, but my first computer was a Commodore 64.
The ol’ RS232?
Shit. I know what this is. Goddammit.
Big keyboard jack, serial for mouse, parallel for printer
Don’t forget the serial input for gamepads and joysticks in the dedicated sound board for some reason
Early PC only had 5 card slots, and the only jack on the motherboard was the keyboard. One slot is going to be used by a video card, one’s probably being used by a hard drive controller, one’s probably used by a parallel + serial card. Soundcards also included controller ports to try to save a slot.
I thought sometimes they called them game ports (for the joystick.)
I reasoned if you are installing a sound card, you are probably doing some gaming, so it made sense to sort of bundle those together.
Its on the sound card because it’s a midi port. Its designed for connecting a keyboard (as in electronic piano). Most people used it for gamepads but that’s not what it was there for.
And because the PC only have 1 serial port, you disconnect the printer and use a parallel to serial adapter.
Except that wasn’t a serial port, it was midi, and the reason it was on the sound card was because the input was analog.
Your joystick was just two fancy potentiometers, and your soundcard decoded the voltage on the middle legs into a position.
Soundcards handled joysticks because they had the fastest ADCs.
huh, i thought it was just because “owning a sound card” and “likely to play games” was the biggest overlap of the Venn circles.
Wow, 30 years later and I’m just learning this now. Thank you
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
The 15-pin D-sub connector itself was apparently a combination of analog and digital. It had to be, since MIDI is digital (it’s right there in the name: Musical Instrument Digital Interface). TIL it wasn’t all digital.
They didn’t even use an ADC. They used 555 timers to produce a pulse. They measured the length of the pulse to determine the potentiometer position. Since there are 4 analog inputs, they typically used the 558 timer which is the quad version of the 555.
And here I thought I had it all figured out. But it does make sense. Doing it with an analog signal introduces noise and measuring pulse widths is going to be simpler.
Yes, this is where my PC master gaming started.
I raise
edit, actually, it might have been on the back…it’s been forever since I touched one
My age in fond memories:
I don’t have long for this world…
Me too… my first code was for Commodore PET. Then I got an Amiga. Sad day when Commodore folded.
I’ll see your raise, and up it:
Please,
I always see those videos where people give kids a walkman or a rotary phone and ask them to figure out what it is or how it works. I’m imagining some medieval merchant handing me an abacus and laughing because I can’t figure it out.
It’s little endian, so the beads on the far right are used to outnumber the big endian beads at the top on the woke left. After several computations, the middle section is just gone
Tried reading about endianness once. Pretty sure it can’t be dumbed down enough for my brain.
You know how some languages write left-to-right, and some rught-to-left? Endianness is that, for numbers.
Or another analogy is dates: 2025/12/31 is big endian, 31/12/2025 is little endian. And 12/31/2025 is middle endian. Which makes no sense at all because the middle is, by definition, not an end.
I stand corrected. No idea what I was reading (several years ago), but whatever it was made it seem way more complicated. Maybe it was just an explanation from somebody who didn’t know.
Ouch. I had to learn endianness once to solve a real life serialization bug. It sucked. I learned it for just long enough to correct the code for the corner cases involves, and then slept and forgot everything about it.
Young whippersnappers.
You kids don’t know how good you have it!
Fun fact, the Romans would never have labeled their abacuses like this. It would have made calculating very difficult; they effectively worked with modern numbers in bead form, and then used the famous numeral system just to record the results.
My buddy still has one of those in his garage.
“do you know what ps/2 ports are?”
“holy cow, PlayStation 2? you must be AT LEAST 25!”
[dying inside intensifies]
IBM sure made naming pretty confusing aren’t they?
Ps/2 ports predated the PlayStation 2 by years. Sony made naming confusing in this case.
How can ports of a game predate the platform itself? That makes zero sense.
(/s)
In my day, the RJ-11 jack was for connecting the keyboard, not the phone line.
I remember those days.
Okay that’s something I had no idea about hahaha
You guys had keyboards?
An elegant port for a more civilized time
Nothing civilized about no hot plugging. Had to restart the whole damn computer, if the cable was loose or out at startup.
skill issue
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t hot plug for anyone. Yes, even the very skilled.
The time of the classic “Keyboard missing. Press F1 to continue.”
You know that thing that you don’t have? You should press buttons on it.
Fuck you computer…
The error message sounds bad, but it was actually a good thing. A better phrased error message might have been “Keyboard missing. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue.” But, in the early days every byte mattered.
The system wouldn’t work without a keyboard, and if you get further into the boot process you might not be able to shut down cleanly if you didn’t have a keyboard attached. That error message gave you a chance to attach the keyboard, or to troubleshoot why the keyboard wasn’t being properly detected (like the plug got bumped and wasn’t making good contact anymore).
It was annoying when the lack of a keyboard was intentional. Like, you wanted to use the machine as a server. But, AFAIK you could disable this check if you knew the machine was going to be a server with no permanent keyboard attached.
I said the real two genders.
There where three. The full din keyboard plug, serial for your mouse and that unholy thing on the back of your sound blaster on which you could connect a joystick.
That’s a midi port
It’s supposed to be, but it’s really just a joystick port.
That’s how most people used it, yeah. But it’s meant to be a midi port which is why it’s on sound cards.
It often worked poorly as such though. While it worked great as a joystick port. I drew my own conclusions.
Tbf most things worked poorly back then. I constantly had to pop my 386 open and jiggle the ram to get it to boot
That’s… not typical though.
This reminds me when a mouse was an option not a requirement
still is
/i3gang
What kind of connector is this? I remember seeing them on 1970s audio equipment, maybe for mic in?
It’s an AT/ XT keyboard connector.
And back then if we did have a mouse, it was square, and used a 9pin serial port
I tried to explain these ports to a salesperson at micro center, and they have me the dull cow stare.
I was looking at some PC’s at Best Buy and a salesman came up to try and give me the hard sell. I asked if I could buy the PC without Windows on it for a discount.
“How would you use your computer without Windows on it?”
“I’m going to install Linux”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an operating system”
Blank stare
“Like Windows or OS X…”
Blank Stare
Sigh “I already have a copy of Windows at home”
“Oh! Well I don’t think you can do that, no.”
“how old are you?”
TURBO!!!
The “Turbo” function was a masterstroke of marketing.
The actual function of the turbo is to slow the machine down, so it can be compatible with older games and software that ran too quickly on those newer systems.
Of course calling it a “slow down” button wasn’t very sexy, so just flip the function around and label it turbo instead!
The computer mouse I still use today has a ball in it
When was the last time you cleaned it out?
Earlier this week it stopped going up and down, only side to side. Had to clean some crap off the x-axis wheel.
Good stuff, was imagining a 30 year old mouse with 30 year old crud! 🤮
Given how fast crud accumulates and how much it impacts use, I don’t think that would be usable, and probably wouldn’t have been for some years.
Back in my day they weren’t color coded.
That’s because color hadn’t been invented yet and therefore people could only see in black and white. That’s why old shows don’t have color.
Back in my day days didn’t exist /s
