I forgot how slow USB is...

[Dronecatcher]

And you used to be able to USE the Pocket PC as a graphics tablet back then.

There were some pretty powerful apps back then for those devices but the serial connection was painful - loading up a dozen mp3s took more than a hour!

 

[bunnspecial]

I have an old acoustic coupler modem designed to work with Ma Bell's standard G series handsets in a junk box somewhere. I picked it up at school from a lab clean-out, and just couldn't stand to see it go to the trash.

Speaking of USB 1.1, PPC computers from the Sawtooth on up to about the time USB 2.0 became standard were actually officially USB bootable, and it's possible to boot from a USB volume using boot manager(rather than open firmware as with later PPC Macs).

On a couple of occasions, I've booted my TiBook into Leopard from an external USB-connected SATA drive. It takes about 20 minutes to boot to boot to a working desktop when going this route.

It's a shame that Apple "officially" removed this ability(even though I know it can still be done from OF) when USB 2.0 came along, as that actually made USB booting practical and viable.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Slowest I've dealt with is doing Hard Disk copies over a LocalTalk network, and saving and loading files from an Apple II to a cassette. Now that is for the patient!

Can take over a minute to load 20K...

Cassette data, now that is another realm...my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, a 16K program seemed to take forever...and you'd hold your breath and not dare move whilst it was loading incase it failed..which it often did.

 

[poiihy]

Well, my parents had a few computers before I came along... They had 2 386 computers, which the second one was dated at the time they bought it. Then they bought a top-of-the-line Dell Dimension XPS T500. That was my childhood computer right up until 2011, when it died and I got my MacBook Pro. It was one of the best computers I've ever used. It had a Pentium 3, great Diamomd video card, decoder card, Zip drive, CD/DVD-ROM drive, floppy drive, eithernet, 56k modem, and of course, USB 1.1. Now Windows 98 never had full USB support, so you would have to put it in yourself and then you could use flash drives. After the computer died, I tried so hard to get it running again, and last year I finally got it running again, after swapping the Pentium 3 with a Pentium 2. I was very pleased with myself. So I was using it again and successfully got it on the Internet using eithernet, which my parents never installed right, so the computer was never updated. Now you can't update it, so I got the flash drive software and installed it from a cd. But boy was USB 1.1 slow, I couldn't really use it for much because of how slow it was.

Well that's my little USB 1.1 story...

Thank god for peripheral interface cards!

 

[Gamer9430]

Thank god for peripheral interface cards!

No kidding... That computer, and even my windows XP Dell Dimensions 4700 would be much less usable today or in the recent past.

 

[UKgaryb]

My first computer was a AST Advantage! Adevnutre! 50mhz, 4mb ram, 250mb hdd we upgraded to a apple 7600?? Beige desktop thing with ADB BUS and a compaq presario p233mmx, 16mb ram, 4gb quantum Bigfoot 5" hdd in a rocket style case, had USb 1.1 but windows 95 didn't support it without SR2

Anyway the only way to transfer data was parallel port and some transfer software, talk about suicide inducing!

I ended up grabbing two Novell ne1000 isa network cards, some coax T pieces and terminators, transferring got a whole lot quicker

With a aui converter I was able to connect the Mac + compaq together with some software to get them to talk and share a 33.6 modem!! Those were the days.