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Comment by septune | Hacker News Reader

Have bricked a windows NT server pluging a printer while the machine was ON => kernel panic and NTFS filesystem was corrupted. Beware the parallel port is not hot-pluggable :)

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Then something very weird was doing Windows NT.

I plug/unplug many times a printer, and a ZIP disk unit, to the parallel port without issues on Windows 95/98/ME. And more recently, a 90's Roland plotter on a 2010's computer that have yet a parallel port, running Debian.

Probably like the ps/2 port, it's not actually hotplugable, but most of the time you can get away with it.

The article mentioned there was an effective dma mode where the parallel port was wired directly into the isa bus. I imagine that if a port was in that state it could cause some real havoc if something suddenly got plugged in.

Well, actually messing with plugged devices sending interrupts to a CPU could halt the OS easily.

I hot plugged printers for decodes. No one turned off the computer to unplug or plug-in the printer.

Yes so did i. The fact is that you can live forever playing Russian roulette if you turn the cylinder every time.

That happened with PS/2 keyboards and mice too.

AT motherboards had a physical, discrete fuse on the keyboard connector that would sometimes blow if you hot-swapped the keyboard. Then soldering iron ahoy.

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/486-motherboard-ke...

Oh, TIL, thanks. I didn't know that.

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