12 Nov
2005
12 Nov
'05
9:38 a.m.
There are plenty of junk boards that have no
particular useful
function.
Doubtless true, but...
I've got a bunch of ISA cards that I salvaged.
All were old models
of a gizmo that appeared to a PC as a monochrome adapter, but which
translated the CPU writes to video memory to serial codes to a VT-220
type terminal.
...this does *not* qualify! Argh!
Why would anyone want to do this?
So you can take a peecee with a BIOS not supporting serial console and
hook it up to a multi-serial-port gadget for remote console access, of
course.
I believe there's a company making those gadgets right now (PC Weasel,
I think they call it - it took a while before I twigged to the
difference between that and the kind of weasel used to read "odd" disks
- catweasel, I think it's called). That they have a market indicates
that this is not "no particular useful function", even today.
Dunno--it wasn't fast and all of these boards lack
the PROMs that
would make them work in any case.
Well, I suppose what's done is done. But taking a board that needs
nothing but a PROM to be a highly useful gadget and blowtorching it to
turn it into a pile of spare parts is the sort of thing that makes me
wince when I hear of it, akin to that time I mentioned I was looking
for the SBus card part of an xbox (the Sun SBus extender, not the game
console) and someone said something like "oh dear, just two weeks ago I
acrapped a dozen of them".
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