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Search - "lpt1"
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>>> print(whoSaid("OlderFriend"))
About 20ish years ago I was working in IT, and it was about around this time where CD-Roms were hitting the stores and becoming the newest craze. However, Microsoft did not write the drivers correctly for this new hardware.
In a nutshell, the driver would be installed and the user would lose the sound to their speaker.
How did this happen? By altering the way the interrupts worked on the computer. At the time there only existed a few unreserved IRQs or Interrupt ReQuests. The installer package would redirect IRQ 5 which is "User Selectable (Sound Cards)" to work with the CD-Rom. This was fine and all unless you wanted to listen to your speakers.
I had come up with a clever hack through rewriting a config file that would be run during bootup. So at the time of boot up IRQ 5 would be dedicated to the sound card, and IRQ7 (which was usually for the Lpt1 Printer) would be dedicated to the CD-Rom. This worked.
And because I was IT at the time, I would get a lot of calls for fixing this problem.
So, as you can imagine, I've gotten **really** good at doing this. I didn't even need to be at a computer to walk someone through the problem.
I receive a call one day, it was a problem with the CD-Rom and sound card. I walk him through the problem and he reboots his computer. I could hear him on the other side jumping with joy when he was able to put in his music CD and hear sound coming from the speakers.
He asks me, how in the hell did you figure this out!? You're a fucking Genius!
And I said, It's not rocket science it's just a computer.
There was a long pause of silence.
Uhhh... Hello? Did I say something wrong?
Sir, I work at NASA I deal with Rocket Science on a daily basis.4 -
I felt very inspired when I first controlled a LED using QBasic and the LPT1 (printer) port, back in 1996. It just felt like "so much power"!
(Was more or less similar to the photo)1 -
First time I developed something useful:
My dad has a bunch of games on his work computer, which he wasn't supposed to have. I wrote a small program for him that added the name of the directory which held those games to IO.SYS table of devices (COM1, LPT1, etc...) so nobody could open it.2