HI SYN!

As some of my friends know, a huge pet peeve of mine about computers is legacy ports. So while searching for some information on Linux’s bluetooth support and trying to find out what motherboards/SFF systems have bluetooth support I stumbled upon this post on Slashdot:

As time goes by, more and more ports/connectors add up on my motherboards. When are we going to get ride of ps/2 buses, parallels and serial ports?

So now we would have:

bluetooth
parallel port
serial ports
Serial IDE
Parallel IDE
Firewire
ps2 buses
USB
– Next ones are not on motherboards, but still…—
Analog joystick port (gameport)
VGA output
Audio ports
Ethernet

Am I missing a port? Keeping legacy ports does add cost on the systems…

I wish we could go by with firewire only. Everything on firewire. HDs, modem, joystick, keyboard… Only analog output like Video and Audio would remain. BTW, most motherboards do not come with Firewire on, but I bet there must be a few out there with it.

Source: Link [~half way down the page]
This was made back in 2002, so I’m glad to see a bulk of people were thinking the same way I am even back then. My ideal motherboard would consist of ports for the following:

- SATA2

- eSATA port

- USB 2.0

- Firewire

- 1Gbit NIC

- Bluetooth support
With possible variations containing wireless instead of the 1Gb NIC and both the NIC and wireless. This is on top of the usual CPU, memory and chipsets that go on the board. The idea here is to mimize space required, cost and power required. Power consumption is something I’m becoming more and more aware of and trying to minimize my personal power footprint for both cost and ecological reasons.

And what exactly do I mean by “legacy”?

Parallel Port - Original IBM PC

Serial Port - Original IBM PC

Game Port - Orignal IBM PC

PS/2 Mouse - IBM PS/2

PS/2 Keyboard - IBM PS/2

3.5″ Floppy - IBM PS/2

PATA (IDE) - Compaq (1985)

PCI Slots - Intel 1992

AGP Slots - Intel 1997

The PCI Slot is the only slot I would consider okay to keep, but even then I need to look into this more, I bet you can get rid of it and survive. The AGP slot ‘just’ came out in 1997, and I remember that well since I saw beta boards with it on and thought it was the coolest thing since a GUI on an OS.