LaPorta
Well-known member
@bibilit
on that footnote, i think that partially the scsi-vs-parallel blame really lays outside iomega as well tho .. parallel apparently was introduced well before 1980 then scsi for in 1986 but umm ok yeah if parallel was db25 in the first place then how come scsi had to decide to be exactly physically the same db25 too without even using any kind of blocker pin/notch or anything? (meanwhile thankfully centronic ports were incompatible on purpose weirdly enough, c36 for parallel versus c50 for scsi)
Part of it is who would want to fit that 50 pin massive kludge of a port on the back of their Mac Plus back when?
As an aside, I always found Apple’s solutions more elegant. PCs were always more “dumpy” to me. Much larger serial ports instead of the mini-DINs on the Plus and up. Being able to use ADB to plug the mouse into the keyboard vs two dedicated, separate PC ports. I’ve often wondered just how much cable and sheath have been needlessly wasted over the decades by PCs requiring mouse cables 3x as long as Apple’s (continuing into the USB era for no good reason other than PC manufacturers either being too lazy to put ports in their keyboards or shortening the mouse cable).
My final diatribe is the biggest beef I have: Backspace and Num Lock keys persisting into the present day. Apple correctly changed Backspace into Delete once ADB came along since the key no longer put you back a space but deleted a character. Nearly 30 years later, PC makers still call it Backspace. There have also been arrow keys for a good 30 years: using the number pad as arrows and swapping them using a Num Lock key is utterly pointless. Nothing drives me more bonkers when I use a PC at work, start typing in numbers, and all that happens is the input cursor dances around…grrrr!
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