Re:The void left by the parallel port
by billforsternz on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:18PM
(#11640750)
Indeed. As a software guy I was sufficiently proud of my hardware effort that I neatly organised everything as a flying lead coming out of the Mephisto complete with strain relief and a tidy professional looking connector. Not as good as a mounting the connector flush somehow, but pretty good for me. It's still in my cupboard and it still worked well (as a chess computer) last time I tried it, although after 25+ years I wonder whether the EPROM is due to start shedding bits. Trying it out as a 68K dev board is more problematic - for reasons discussed in the main article - occasionally I consider having a go but these days I usually find life is too short for those sorts of things.
Great story! The rejuvenation of your EPROM sounds like a job for a Bus Pirate!
I miss those days as well. It's a lot easier to repurpose things made out of through-hole mounted 7400 series logic than all the custom surface mounted stuff you see today.
On the flip side, though, back then to make your own boards you had to shell out thousands of dollars for the software and more thousands for a prototype run.