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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

PCgamer:

> Incidentally, the late Steve Jobs deserves a tip-of-the-hat for helping USB become a long-lasting standard. It was in 1998 that USB made some real headway, courtesy of the iMac G3, the first computer to ship with only USB ports for external devices (there were no serial or parallel ports). That came three years after USB 1.0 debuted, with a data rate of 12Mbps.

Also PCgamer:

> Given that it was a protocol designed to counter the typically Apple expense of sticking Firewire onto a motherboard, cost was the biggest reason for the eventual success of USB as a thing

Apple started building FireWire 400 into Macs when 12Mbps USB 1.0 was not really an equivalent. USB 2.0 didn't make the cut for the first generation iPod but was supported on subsequent models.

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> the first computer to ship with only USB ports

I remember presenting this in a project as an undergraduate and I was challenged by the lecturer that it would be highly unusual for a consumer device to ship without RS232 and I could only say “yeah”

> I remember presenting this in a project as an undergraduate and I was challenged by the lecturer that it would be highly unusual for a consumer device to ship without RS232 and I could only say “yeah”

It's kinda funny that this makes complete sense to me and I wouldn't have argued it either, but at the same time despite having been using computers since the late '80s the only thing I've ever had that required the use of a serial port for normal operation was my 2001-era Palm m100.

PS/2 keyboards/mice, parallel printers, and gameport controllers I had many of each, but all my modems were internal so the first time I ever plugged something in to a serial port was a null-modem cable in late '99 so my friend and I could use Windows 98 Direct Cable Connection to play Counter-Strike against each other without having to buy ethernet cards.

Aside from that one Palm device everything I've ever plugged in to an actual serial port has been a temporary thing like that null-modem connection. Mostly serial console for last resort access to misbehaving network appliances. Even then, most devices that have had the slightest bit of effort put in to them in the last 20 years have at least built in a USB-Serial adapter these days so we don't have to deal with the battle of devices that want full 12v RS232 and USB-DE9 adapters that deliver somewhere between 5 and 8.

To be fair for very long time most motherboards had RS232 port on headers, just not on back plate.

Some pro workstation boards still do!

WX-X299-PRO or its newer cousin ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE

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