It was one of those clean-your-room exercises (and I wasn’t even shut-in by a snowstorm; -30C and windchill is wonderful weather as far as I’m concerned, almost jealous of Aaron, assuming I had enough coats and a toque). And I found my stash of serial cables and equipment. 30 times a 25-pin to 9-pin converter. Six gender changers. 10m of 25-pin flatcable, 25m of 9-pin cable, lots of shorter sections, splitters, hand-wired null modem cables and the whole shebang.

All of it went in the trash.

Back in 1996 this was useful and valuable equipment; we had a P75 in the living room of our student flat and not one but two serial terminals hooked up so you could log in to that machine. I could log in, dial up, and start pine on the remote university computers from my bedroom. Such was the state of the art computing on Linux at the time. Later that year, Matthias announced something called “KDE”. And oddly enough, nowadays I don’t have multiple users on my workstation, even though it’s roughly 400 times as powerful.