Vintage

I feel like a relic..

I used to have disc with kickstart that i needed to use so my computer would boot.

I'm this old

DB9 is still used on for MIDI on electronic instruments, though some manufacturers are moving to doing it with a TRS 3.5mm plug since it only uses 3 pins.
I had a mouse that plugged into the serial port, but my first computer was a Commodore 64.
Shit. I know what this is. Goddammit.
- Sorry bro
The ol' RS232?
- No, this is the rs232 connector (officially the DB9)

i have a gaming pc built this decade that has both of those ports dude

People knew what I meant when I would verbally say PS/2 in conversation, then people started thinking they were USB because that's what was used in their PlayStation 2

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.
This reminds me when a mouse was an option not a requirement
- still is
  /i3gang
My keyboard still uses a PS/2 port via adapter. 1986 Model M, still clicky.

"do you know what ps/2 ports are?"

"holy cow, PlayStation 2? you must be AT LEAST 25!"

[dying inside intensifies]

IBM sure made naming pretty confusing aren't they?
- Ps/2 ports predated the PlayStation 2 by years. Sony made naming confusing in this case.
- Not really? I mean it was a whole thing. OS/2, PS/2, I think maybe some PC/2? I can't remember. Anyway it was all branded together.

Are these not still in use?

I've not built a tower in a few years granted, but the last one I built had PS2 ports. Heck it even had VGA for the onboard graphics.

They are. Lots of motherboards still include these.There are a lot of special PS/2 input devices that are still around in business/industrial settings and gamers sometimes need them for use with flight sticks, steering wheels, mechanical keyboards etc.
Usually it's a combo port now instead of a separate port for keyboard/mouse.
- ive only seen them as separate ports tho even in recent pcs

An elegant port for a more civilized time

Hokey connections and ancient peripherals are no match for a good dongle at your side, kid.
Nothing civilized about no hot plugging. Had to restart the whole damn computer, if the cable was loose or out at startup.
- Quote joke referencing Obi Wan Kenobi...
- skill issue
- I loved the PCs that had Ctrl + up as a shortcut to flip the monitor orientation. I think it was a Dell thing?
  My favourite prank was to flip the screen upside down then unplug the keyboard. Good luck saving your work fuck face

I actually wanted a PS2 port because it works with interrupts rather than polling but they aren't really included anymore.

I feel like they don't make boards for people like me who want small boards with a super niche port.

When a MoDT Mini-ITX board comes out with a PS2 port I will buy that instantly

Can you actually notice the latency?
Listen up, computer, I'm typing NOW. Not whenever you get around to polling the USB device. Sheesh.

I remember a time when they weren't colour coded...

My brother in Christ, I also used this

And I'm 17

the computers at my first school still used ps/2 regularly when i went there and im 15.....
old

You guys had keyboards?

I said the real two genders.

There where three. The full din keyboard plug, serial for your mouse and that unholy thing on the back of your sound blaster on which you could connect a joystick.
- Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had... variable success.
  The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it's the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)
  Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You'd imagine it'd work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you're really into screwing things in place.
- That's a midi port

I tried to explain these ports to a salesperson at micro center, and they have me the dull cow stare.

I was looking at some PC's at Best Buy and a salesman came up to try and give me the hard sell. I asked if I could buy the PC without Windows on it for a discount.
"How would you use your computer without Windows on it?"
"I'm going to install Linux"
"What's that?"
"It's an operating system"
Blank stare
"Like Windows or OS X..."
Blank Stare
Sigh "I already have a copy of Windows at home"
"Oh! Well I don't think you can do that, no."
To be honest, I think that was probably to appropriate response. Information about ps/2 is not really relevant to them or any customer that they are going to help

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?

Bitch

please.

(Kidding, you’re not a bitch and this isn’t a contest. But if it was…)

I don't recognize this... Is it some sort of RF switch for connecting a computer or game system to a TV while still passing through the antenna signal? Why does it have two cables coming out the side?
- Yes, it's for an old game console or computer.
  There were two common ways to connect to the TV, and this box supports both: Coaxial (still around of course) and that flat ribbon cable, which ends in two separate U shaped clips. The screws on the bottom are for the clips on the ribbon cable from the physical antenna likely mounted on the roof.
- Yes, back when you could use a tube tv as a monitor over RF.
  e: mine still works, and I’ve connected my ancient equipment to my newer flat televisions with it.
I still play my 2600.
I think the coleco vision had that.

lol PS/2 ports are the newer ones. There were larger AT ports and ADB ports in addition to the 25-pin(!) LPT port (printer mostly) and COM ports (random peripherals including early mice, pre ps/2)

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.
- Early PC only had 5 card slots, and the only jack on the motherboard was the keyboard. One slot is going to be used by a video card, one’s probably being used by a hard drive controller, one’s probably used by a parallel + serial card. Soundcards also included controller ports to try to save a slot.
- And because the PC only have 1 serial port, you disconnect the printer and use a parallel to serial adapter.
- @josefo@leminal.space @JoMiran@lemmy.ml
  Technically speaking, the joystick involved analog voltages to be converted to digital signals... And what else have ADC (analog-to-digital converters) chips? Soundcards, because ADCs are used to convert mic input, alongside the "line in", both of which are analog voltages, into PCM signals, which are discrete (as in "non-continuous") streams of bits. Something inverse happens for "headphone", "speakers" and "line out" pins: a PCM stream coming from the sound driver is converted to analog voltages using a DAC.
  While other ports also happened to deal with analog-digital conversion, a soundcard was particularly specialized at this job, alongside graphic (VGA) cards (VGA has lots of analog signals), but graphic cards were already too busy with thousands/millions of pixels and, well, with computation of graphics.
  Other boards aren't so fitting for analog-digital job. For example: a NIC (Network Interface Card) already deals with digital signal so, theoretically, no conversion is necessary from/to analog. Parallel ports (those for printers) also natively deals with digital signals. Expansion cards with USB ports, same thing. And so on...
  (Apologies for my blank reply if my deletion didn't federate due to insufficient Sharkey-Lemmy federation, I mistyped enter as I was getting ready to write my message)
- And because the PC only have 1 serial port, you disconnect the printer and use a parallel to serial adapter.
Yes, this is where my PC master gaming started.
This one for me. Was born in 82.
- Born in '88 and this was also my childhood. But to be fair, my parents bought the PC from Sears so it was probably an older, budget model. It ran Windows 3.1 and had a 16 MHz 386 with the Turbo button.
I'm in this picture.

The computer mouse I still use today has a ball in it

When was the last time you cleaned it out?
- Earlier this week it stopped going up and down, only side to side. Had to clean some crap off the x-axis wheel.
Me too. As a toolmaker and engineer, space mice were a thing. But they were stupidly expensive and still are. I was unwilling to spend the money for one. So I use a ball mouse and I still do for when I need to do serious CAD work these days-- designing my next model steam engine.
I have a 286 which connects through a COM (serial) port. Its mouse also has a ball since solid state lasers hadn't been invented
I'm very glad those mouses are maintainable and seem to last forever

I'm fine., thanks.

In my day, the RJ-11 jack was for connecting the keyboard, not the phone line.

I remember those days.
Okay that's something I had no idea about hahaha
- The first three Macs had this jack in the front for the keyboard and a PC-like serial port in the back for the mouse. With the Mac SE and II, the switched to ADB, which looked like a PS/2 port, but you could daisy chain your mouse, keyboard, and other inputs like tablets or joysticks all into one jack in the back of the computer.

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....
- Way back, there were some rare keyboard / motherboard combinations where the motherboard couldn't detect there was a keyboard attached unless a key was pressed on it. That message was for those people with those combinations.
  You pressed F1 and the computer would be like "my bad, there is a keyboard there, thanks for your help", or rather it would just shut up and boot.
  The message could have been different but it had to fit in a small amount of BIOS ROM, so we got stuck with the one that covered all the bases the best, and unfortunately, most people who saw it didn't actually have a keyboard plugged in, thus, irony.
- 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.

These aren't old. I had one in the early 2010s, it was handed down by a relative because my parents were poor.

I'm Gen Z

Look at you with your fancy ps/2 keyboard port. Where's my AT port and 9 pin serial mouse.

Look at you with your fancy AT port.
Where's my altair with front panel register switches
- Ok, I'm not that old either, but still

I remember having a friend ask why my mouse connected to a s-video port.
Explain this please.
- It's a picture of the ADB ports (for mouse and keyboard, but not only...) on a Mac IIci.

if I remember correctly my first PC had the bigger DIN connector for the keyboard and a DSUB9 for the mouse. Guess I'm old ;)

Same. I remember needing converters for these newfangled PS/2 connectors. Then again, I am old enough that I remember why floppies were called floppies, and used tape for more than just backup. And hard drives being as big as a shoe box and with less storage than you now have as CPU caches.
- Was the tape to cover the write protect notch on the floppy?

Fairly certain my first computer used something like this for the keyboard. I did not have a mouse.

The venerable DIN connector!
- That thing was a monster!
IIRC, that's electrically compatible with the smaller, more fragile PS/2 connector. The adapters are just wiring it down to the smaller connector (and maybe some impedance matching resistors?).
- I did have a converter from this to a ps/2 connection when I got a newer computer.
- Only if it's an AT keyboard. XT keyboards are incompatible and require active conversions. They use the same port.

Years of cheaply made plastic membrane keyboards. I tried gaming on a membrane recently, and it was traumatizing.

"how old are you?"

TURBO!!!
- The "Turbo" function was a masterstroke of marketing.
  The actual function of the turbo is to slow the machine down, so it can be compatible with older games and software that ran too quickly on those newer systems.
  Of course calling it a "slow down" button wasn't very sexy, so just flip the function around and label it turbo instead!
Mmmm - turbo button. Classic.
Gotta have an LED display so everyone can see your speed in megahertz.

I'm this old.

Oh I first learned to type by typing "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs" over and over on a wireless keyboard.

Called a typewriter.

Me too. But in early 2000s

I still have my old PC with AT keyboard connector and serial port for mouse.

Back in my day they weren't color coded.

That's because color hadn't been invented yet and therefore people could only see in black and white. That's why old shows don't have color.
- Well they were pretty racist in spite of not seeing color
Back in my day days didn't exist /s
And the newer ones then "removed" the color coding by doing one half of the circle in green, the other half in purple...
- Those are just a combined port. You can use it for one or the other or use a splitter for both. The dual port was very popular on 90s laptops.

Anybody else here play Oregon Trail on a teletype terminal? The school had 2 terminals in a small basement room that a few of us nerds could get access to for and hour or two a week, We would try to learn Basic, (with no one to teach us), and play Oregon Trail and get yelled at for going through some much thermal paper.......

But the keyboard is the computer, mice haven’t been invented yet and where do I plug the tape deck in?

I can also use cartridges!
Well, I could use cartridges...before I loaded a custom ROM via the cartridge slot, and it does almost everything faster, but now I cannot function without it.

This old

Nice, I have the Radio Shack rebadged one. It's murder on batteries though.

I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post's photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.
This belongs on a sound card for some reason!! :D
- Joystick and MIDI interface port

A yung'un huh

Like 30 something?

Yeah well my first computer typed in cuneiform so get off my lawn you kids

Typed! Back in my day we just got a wire that you had to lick in binary to tell the computer what to do.
- A wire!? We just got raw sand and had to scratch out a calculation ourselves.

How are old you

You why are old

Edit: I never used one of these, I'm just as old as one. First computers I used were a Macintosh 128k and an Apple ]|[, unless you count the TI 91-a as a computer and not a console, but that machine is older than me

I had a VIC-20, the predecessor to the C64...
- Same here. I was so excited when we upgraded to a 128, and skipped the 64 entirely. That was some serious computing power.

Remember when Star Wars Shadows of the Empire came out on PC and apparently, it's been awhile so maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but you needed a special card for your keyboard to play it?

no search results relevant to this.
do you mean a card as in a pc hardware ISA / PCI device, or like a paper overlay card with reminders for button actions?
- ok I must be losing my mind then. I could have sworn it required something like this: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31qtoUfewyL.jpg I remember as a kid going to a babages and picking up a copy and a guy was like "does your computer have a keyboard card? otherwise it wont' work" and then I swore it was also stated on the box....but christ now I might have just been dreaming it.

Um , b4 that there were serial mice on my tandy

I thought I was hot shit when I got a tape drive for my Tandy that worked about 60% of the time
- Dam don't remember that. My co worker was telling me about hole punch paper when he worked with his father that he inserted instead of magnetic storages.

PS/2 isn't vintage. I'm still using an adapter to connect my Microsoft Natural keyboard through USB.

Oh, wait...

Many professional gamers still depend on them because they have lower latency than USB.

That's a myth that should die out. It used to be true, decades ago, but not anymore.
The PS/2 protocol interrupts the CPU and sends a packet. USB has the CPU poll the connection and then gets the packet. However, the polling and clock rate of USB is so high that it can hit it several times before the PS/2 is done transmitting a single packet.
NKRO is also no longer an issue in newer USB versions. You have to get a more expensive keyboard to make it work--cost of all the diodes adds up--but that was just as true of PS/2.
Here's a Ben Eater video that goes over the details with an oscilloscope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgULBpRoXk
They've finally started removing them from boards, and I'm annoyed. I want my NKRO.
Most of them are internally connected via USB apparently so there's no difference. Not that the average e sports player would even notice.
- I want my NKRO.
  Which can be done over USB, cheap keyboards just aren't wired for it.

what the actual hell is that? a port connector for the borg?
- It's a connector for an IBM 7000 series mainframe.
Is your username a beyond all reason reference or a late Roman Empire reference?

Box o’ “useless” cables gang represent

Runs on AMD Artix 7 FPGA

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I ordered one when they announced it. I have 2 perfectly good C64s already but the CRT whine drives my dog and kid nuts, so looking forward to HDMI!
- There are HDMI mods for the C64 as well.
- I thought the new one would have more capabilities than just running c64 apps. There is a mod of steamdeck kind of like commodore, but it's not perfect either.

Could be worse, could be that one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_connector

(Apple IIe)

My parents got rid of mine without asking when I went to college in the 2000s :(
- I don't remember what happened to ours. It got replaced by a 486/66 Windows 3.1 PC in 1994.
- I just picked one up for $20. Missing the cable for the double disk drive though and it had a bad psu and I have no disks. Basically it's a money pit. But fun to mess with anyway.

I remember the adapters that went from the larger version of this to smaller as well as using the serial port.

Wait!! You had COLOURS?? I'm from the time before that!

I'm using a PS/2 keyboard and trackpad right now.

Adesso ACK-540-pw if anyone is interested.

I'm using a ps2 keyboard because the usb one died.
- I'm using PS/2 because USBHID requires a driver in the kernel and I don't have the RAM for that shit.

I’m fine how are dog you?

Seems that way. Where are the serial and parallel ports?

I didn't switch to a USB optical/laser mouse until 2014

You must like cleaning balls.
- Well...

I wanna say my first PC that I used a was an Amiga with similar i/o as this: I remember that mouse connector vividly.

You had an A3000? Those are not cheap today. Hell, Amigas in general are expensive.
- I think so, but I really can't remember exactly. I mostly remember playing shufflepuck cafe on it when I was young. The next computer we had was a Macintosh 7100. Before getting a gateway years later.
  I'm pretty sure I still have some 3.5" floppies from them.

WDYM old, it's still being used from time to time. For fucky ~~BIOS~~ UEFI's and for easy NKRO without HID report fuckery

ADB was superior.

I used a PS/2 keyboard until like 2 years ago. At some point over 10 years ago I decided that I'd only replace it when it died. But it wasn't very good at dying, and 2years ago I finally had enough of the cheap rubbery switches and the fact that I couldn't press enough keys at the same time

Those things just keep on going. I also have one that was in working condition as of a couple of years ago, which was the last time I needed a spare. It probably still works. That PS/2 rubberdome survived a bath in hot chocolate and then being completely disassembled so that I could clean out the goop that had leaked in between the membranes, and went on to handle several more years of daily wear and tear before I splurged on a New Model M.

These little overclockable bastards ...

You guys have 6 pins? I only have 5!