this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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I got that reference. Fuck, I'm old.
Please explain? I get that the chubby bird is speaking assembly, but I'm sure there's more to it than that?
PS2 keyboards use interrupts rather than polling in USB, meaning every time a key is pressed the CPU stops what its doing to process it.
Cool! I had no idea it was deeper than just a physical interface change.
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I'm this old
The ol' RS232?
Big keyboard jack, serial for mouse, parallel for printer
Don't forget the serial input for gamepads and joysticks in the dedicated sound board for some reason
Except that wasn't a serial port, it was midi, and the reason it was on the sound card was because the input was analog.
Your joystick was just two fancy potentiometers, and your soundcard decoded the voltage on the middle legs into a position.
Soundcards handled joysticks because they had the fastest ADCs.
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
The 15-pin D-sub connector itself was apparently a combination of analog and digital. It had to be, since MIDI is digital (it's right there in the name: Musical Instrument Digital Interface). TIL it wasn't all digital.
huh, i thought it was just because "owning a sound card" and "likely to play games" was the biggest overlap of the Venn circles.
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I raise
edit, actually, it might have been on the back...it's been forever since I touched one
Ooh, I had a serial mouse (9 pin) from Microsoft of all companies, in the 90's.
Damn good mouse.
I’ll see your raise, and up it:
Please,
I always see those videos where people give kids a walkman or a rotary phone and ask them to figure out what it is or how it works. I'm imagining some medieval merchant handing me an abacus and laughing because I can't figure it out.
It's little endian, so the beads on the far right are used to outnumber the big endian beads at the top on the woke left. After several computations, the middle section is just gone
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Young whippersnappers.
You kids don't know how good you have it!
Fun fact, the Romans would never have labeled their abacuses like this. It would have made calculating very difficult; they effectively worked with modern numbers in bead form, and then used the famous numeral system just to record the results.
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What kind of connector is this? I remember seeing them on 1970s audio equipment, maybe for mic in?
It's an AT/ XT keyboard connector.
And back then if we did have a mouse, it was square, and used a 9pin serial port
My keyboard still uses a PS/2 port via adapter. 1986 Model M, still clicky.
This reminds me when a mouse was an option not a requirement
In my day, the RJ-11 jack was for connecting the keyboard, not the phone line.
Okay that's something I had no idea about hahaha
I remember those days.
"do you know what ps/2 ports are?"
"holy cow, PlayStation 2? you must be AT LEAST 25!"
[dying inside intensifies]
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The time of the classic "Keyboard missing. Press F1 to continue."
You know that thing that you don't have? You should press buttons on it.
Fuck you computer....
The error message sounds bad, but it was actually a good thing. A better phrased error message might have been "Keyboard missing. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue." But, in the early days every byte mattered.
The system wouldn't work without a keyboard, and if you get further into the boot process you might not be able to shut down cleanly if you didn't have a keyboard attached. That error message gave you a chance to attach the keyboard, or to troubleshoot why the keyboard wasn't being properly detected (like the plug got bumped and wasn't making good contact anymore).
It was annoying when the lack of a keyboard was intentional. Like, you wanted to use the machine as a server. But, AFAIK you could disable this check if you knew the machine was going to be a server with no permanent keyboard attached.
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