31 Aug
2012
31 Aug
'12
11:55 a.m.
They were, yes, but then again, there are SD and CF
interfaces for
earlier devices such as the ZX Spectrum now, so it is doable.
I didn;t think the system bus was availabe on either of these machines.
SO making an adapter could be 'interesting'. Didn;'t the Z88 take memeory
cartridsges, though? A cartridge to take a flash card would eb intersting...
Both have RS232 ports, don't they? Surely you
can get text off them that
way?
As I said - an /easy/ way to move data. As I have said before, to your
bemusement or incredulity, I really detest RS232 and have done for
about 25 years now. All that fscking around with baud rates and
straight-through versus null-modem cables and so on was a massive
nightmare in the 1980s and it is worse now. I have not used a plain serial device for about 15 years and that is just
fine. I *VERY*
occasionally use proprietary modified-serial connectors, such as
Psion's, and it's still a PITA to get it working and talking to a
modern computer.
I know you don't like it, because you choose to live in the past, but
I really like USB for this. Right now, I have 4 computers on or under
I have a reason for disliking USB here, and it's got nothign to do with
the age of the interfaces. It's that USB is too 'asymmetirc'.
Let me expalin. With RS232, and posslby simpe null modem calbes, I can
link my M100, my HP95LX, my Eposn PX4, etc, etc, etc to my PC. I can a
also link them to each other. I can, for example, link an HP95LX to my PC
nad kermit an intel-hex file to progrma in to na EPROM. I can then take
that 95LX to my workbench and plug it into my EPROM programmer nad upload
the file. Or I can transfer the file to my M100. Or I can link the M100
striagn to the PC. Or to any of my otehr machines.
YOu simply can';t do that with USB. There is no way to link 2 USB mastes
or slaves together. USB gets round the problem of null-modme cables by
making them impossible, and prventing you from doing the thigns you
needed a null modem cable for with RS232.
It's great. Keyboards, mice, tablets, trackballs,
trackpads, printers,
phones, PDAs, card readers, floppy drives, hard drives, optical
drives, scanners, multifunction devices, all-in-one devices, modems,
network adapters, displays, everything has one type of cable and one
type of port and you plug it in and it just works. I love it. This is
how computers /should/ be.
No ti's not. It makes those staks that the manufacters intend you to do
-- plugging in the normal peripehrals -- easy, and other jobs, almost
impossible. Since I use computers in unconventional ways, I need to be
able to do the latter.
I still love the old stuff and retrocomputing, but I
also have work to
do, and life is too short for parity bits and stop bits and guessing
how many data bits and trying to find a baud rate both ends can handle
and software handshaking versus hardware handshaking and what kind of
UART do you have and is your cable wired correctly and which of 42
"standard" connectors are you using.
AS I said earlier, how come I naver have these sorts of problems?
-tony