Back in my day
In my adolescence, I had an Amiga 500 that I purchased used to take advantage of some hardware updates from the Amiga 1000. A while later, I picked up a"whisper quiet" 24-pin NX-Star color printer... and neglected to get proper parallel cables. As a typical youth, I hadn't bothered to set it up until I needed to print out a book report. As an aside, my teachers were thrilled to find out that I was upgrading from my old IBM PC Jr thermal printer. The paper felt gross and at least two of them had to ask for new copies of various assignments because they left the paper sitting on a window ledge...
Anyway, in a fit of desperation, I plugged the printer into the serial port. The Amiga displayed a glorious 4096 colors on my color monitor all at once and then... nothing. Luckily (according to my memory) it was designed with a couple serial chips in sequence that were also meant to act as fuses in case someone did something stupid with them. I was in a users group at the time. A couple members of the users group were repair techs and charged me parts only for the repair... and about two years of ribbing. The first meeting after my repair included an explanation of the difference in parallel and serial in painful detail.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
