Okay Geek Farm
Sunday
Oct182009
List of Old School Technologies That Need To Die
Red Panda
The great thing about the IBM PC platform and Intel's x86 was that it was designed to be backwards compatible. Except some of these things that computers are still compatible with are either holding advancement of computers back, or nobody uses them anymore and nobody cares. So let's bang this list out!
- PS/2 Ports: PS/2, not to be confused with Sony's PS2, were ports for mice and keyboards for PCs until USB peripherals took off around... oh we'll say 2000. What's the problem? They tend to be segregated, they're dedicated, and they're not hot-swappable (meaning every time you wanted a device recognized, you had to reboot). In fact, plugging a device into one of these ports could actually damage it.
- VGA: The DB-15 port. While it's about as ubiquitous as USB for some reason, there's also very little point in keeping it. It's an analog port yet most of our displays are digital. DVI is backwards compatible with the standard anyway and it's not like DisplayPort is going to take over any time soon.
- BIOS: A 16-bit program that can't even handle graphics properly? While I can't confirm or deny, I'm pretty sure EFI can boot PCs faster than BIOS. Seriously, I'm surprised this thing can read over 4GB of RAM.
- Scroll Lock and Pause/Break: These keys were useful in the days of Terminal and DOS. Now they're so rarely used it's a wonder why they're still around. While I've only seen Scroll Lock actually used in one program (Microsoft Excel, of all things), I've never see the Pause/Break key used for anything... except in games that have some sort of pause button.
- Floppy Drives: Most modern BIOS support USB booting. Creating a bootable USB key is easy (a quick Google search will forward you to instructions), and really that's all you need. Besides, who the hell sells floppy disks these days?
- PCI: There's only two reasons why you use this slot: a sound card and wireless LAN. Even then why even bother with the 133MB/s shared bandwidth when you can have a x1 PCI-Express link that provides dedicated 250MB/s of bandwidth? And with pretty much every new sound card coming out in PCI Express x1, PCI is starting to see the last of its days.
- PATA: Anyone like that big, fatty 40/80pin cable that you wedged into hard drives and CD/DVD drives? I don't. They're ugly, take up space, and are a pain to put in and pull out. And pretty much every hard drive made now is SATA, along with an increasing number of DVD drives, and Blu-Ray is purely SATA.
- Convoluted Headers: If anyone has toyed with their PC, disconnected it, and tried to put it back together only to realize that the power button doesn't work... well this is the problem! Case manufacturers and motherboard manufacturers need to get together and devise a method to reduce those jumpers to a single wire that we just plug in and go.
