Serial interfaces

I think most of those have been discussed on this list at some point :-) IIt's the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I would hate to be dogmatic. However, at the time, hard disks were very expensive, and were thus only really used for staring large amounts of data which had to be accessible quickly (if the files were small enoguh to fit on floppies, just change floppies as needed :-)). And the throughput of an RS232 interface, even when set to 38400 baud (which was the fastest normally used for asynchonous transfers at the time) was not really high enough. So I would be slightly suprised if many RS232-interfaced hard disk units were made at that time. As I said earlier, I am exactly the opposite. And I think it comes from the fact that you use machines (in general) as the manufacturer intended, while I trie to do all sorts of odd things with mine. I don't doubt that if you plug a USB memory stick, or a USB-interfaced hard drive, into a modern machine where the OS has drivers for USB mass storage devies, then it works fine. But to be fair that's not unique to USB. I've never had any problems uysing HP's HPIN hard disk units with HP computers that support them. I've enver had any problems plgging DEC serial terminals into a PSP11. It's when you want to do things that hte manufacturer didn't intend, or had never thoguth od, that the 'fun' starts. And USB makes things harder than RE232 if you are doing things like that. A lot harder. -tony