Building A Serial Bus To Save An Old Hard Drive

Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto conventional for sending facts to and from computer system peripherals for just about two a long time, but regardless of the word “universal” in the identify this wasn’t usually the situation. Loads of competing specifications, which includes USB, existed in the computing globe in the a long time ahead of it arrived to dominance, and if you are attempting to recover information from a computer system without having USB you may well have to get artistic with how it’s done.

[Ben] recently arrived across a 80486 with this issue, so he experienced to get artistic to get better the contents of the generate. He calls it the “lunchbox” computer owing to its variety factor, and whilst it doesn’t have USB it does have a tried using-and-dependable serial port to converse with other pcs. [Ben] wrote up a piece of computer software for both equally the acquiring laptop and the sending computer in purchase to duplicate the push sectors just one by one throughout a serial hyperlink to a standalone pc managing Windows XP, and was in a position to get better the contents of the push that way instead.

All of the code [Ben] wrote is readily available on his GitHub site for any person hunting to boot up a 30-yr-old computer all over again. When it may well audio unheard of, pcs of this vintage are nonetheless all-around operating points like CNC equipment or old mainframes.