Vintage
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Don't forget the serial input for gamepads and joysticks in the dedicated sound board for some reason
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.
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But the keyboard is the computer, mice haven’t been invented yet and where do I plug the tape deck in?
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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.
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PS/2
No, not the PlayStation.....
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Big keyboard jack, serial for mouse, parallel for printer
This one for me. Was born in 82.
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Young whippersnappers.
You kids don't know how good you have it!
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Okay that's something I had no idea about hahaha
The first three Macs had this jack in the front for the keyboard and a PC-like serial port in the back for the mouse. With the Mac SE and II, the switched to ADB, which looked like a PS/2 port, but you could daisy chain your mouse, keyboard, and other inputs like tablets or joysticks all into one jack in the back of the computer.
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Maybe I'm an idiot, but I ordered one when they announced it. I have 2 perfectly good C64s already but the CRT whine drives my dog and kid nuts, so looking forward to HDMI!
I thought the new one would have more capabilities than just running c64 apps. There is a mod of steamdeck kind of like commodore, but it's not perfect either.
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But the keyboard is the computer, mice haven’t been invented yet and where do I plug the tape deck in?
I can also use cartridges!
Well, I could use cartridges...before I loaded a custom ROM via the cartridge slot, and it does almost everything faster, but now I cannot function without it.
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I'm this old.
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"how old are you?"
TURBO!!!
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I raise
edit, actually, it might have been on the back...it's been forever since I touched one
edit, actually, it might have been on the back...it's been forever since I touched one
It was along the right side. I remember it helped to sit a little bit to the right, or angle the keyboard a bit, when playing a two player game, so that the leftmost player's joystick cord would reach.
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Tried reading about endianness once. Pretty sure it can't be dumbed down enough for my brain.
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.
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I'm using a PS/2 keyboard and trackpad right now.
Adesso ACK-540-pw if anyone is interested.
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This one for me. Was born in 82.
Born in '88 and this was also my childhood. But to be fair, my parents bought the PC from Sears so it was probably an older, budget model. It ran Windows 3.1 and had a 16 MHz 386 with the Turbo button.
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You kids don't know how good you have it!
At least you have hands! I had to get my fabricated from the town blacksmith.
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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.
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They all got bought by acer and turned into the shittiest brand-name PCs on the planet.
Wasn’t gateway already shitty to begin with?
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"how old are you?"
Gotta have an LED display so everyone can see your speed in megahertz.
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Big keyboard jack, serial for mouse, parallel for printer
Nailed it! I was going to post the DIN-5 kb connector.
