Mac Mini

For those of us who like to play with homebrew hardware, one of the handiest general-purpose interfaces out there is the PC parallel port I I suspect its also why a lot of engineers keep a copy of MS-DOS somewhere in their files). Articles for how to create some simple device attaching to the PC parallel port still appear in EDN's "Ideas for Design" section. What comparable facility is there on the new Macs? I do remember the MS-floated idea of PC-98--the white paper is buried somewhere in my collection of MSDN CDROMs. No keyboard or mouse port, no serial port, no parallel port, no floppy controller. It's all gonna be USB by-and-by with Frewire for faster devices. So maybe the Mini is a picture of things to come. A small sealed box and a desktop littlered with other boxes. Don't know about wires--maybe it'll all be Bluetooth. I hope not--it'd take some of the fun out of fooling around with the hardware. Cheers, Chuck