Easy Portable Serial Ports

Modern operating systems insulate us — as programmers, especially — from so much work. Depending on how far back you go, programmers had to manage their own fonts, their own allocation space on mass storage, or even their own memory allotments. Every year, though, it seems like things get easier and easier. So why is it so annoying to open a simple serial port? It isn’t hard, of course, but on every operating system it seems to be painful — probably in an attempt to be flexible. And it is even worse if you want portability. I needed to write …read more

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New Life For An Obscure Apple Plotter

We’ve all at some point or other seen something done online by somebody else, and thought “I’d like to have a go at that!”. When [Phooky] saw the artwork on the #PlotterTwitter hashtag, he remembered a past donation of a plotter to the NYC Resistor hackerspace. Some searching through the loft revealed a dusty cardboard box containing not the lovely Hewlett-Packard he’d hoped for, but instead an Apple 410 Color Plotter. This proved to be such an obscure part of the legacy Apple product line that almost no information was available for it save for a few diagrams showing DIP …read more

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A Converter You Won’t Have: PS/2 Mouse To Serial Mouse

When did you last buy a mouse? Did it have a little adapter in the box? There was a time when if you bought a USB mouse, in the box was also an adapter to allow it to be used with the older PS/2 interface. And if you were to go back a few more years into the past, you’d have found when you bought a mouse with a PS/2 connector fitted, it may well have come with an adapter for a 9-pin RS232 serial port. Those mice from a decade or more ago would have contained the software to …read more

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