Comment by qsera
10 hours ago
If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
Absolutely~ I remember many summer days as a kid trying to figure out how to send commands to our serial-port driven 2400 baud modem using the AT command set:
Followed by my parents yelling at me to get off the phone since we only had the one landline. :)