This article made me remember that I had to reboot my 386 as a kid when I wanted to plug in my new gaming joystick. Those little things make you appreciate how much more user friendly the machines are today.
Yeah, you could crash a 386 by unplugging its AT keyboard. And crash later systems by unplugging a PS/2 keyboard. (Or, really, plugging one back in.) The fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's USB-A socket is pretty impressive, but the idea of PNP really helped that along too, once it finally got going.
> The fact that a 1st gen USB device will still work in a 2020 computer's USB-A socket
This port has survived 20 years. That's incredible, especially for tech. That said, a lot of things stabilized and matured around that time. Last year, I installed a modern x86 Debian release on a Pentium II system without much fuss. Much older and it gets messier.
RS232 appeared in the 60s and survived well into late 90s (and still being used to this day!). Considering how dramatic the changes were otherwise during that period, it had pretty good run
That reminded me of setting IRQs on my ISA sound blaster using jumpers. I called tech support when I couldn't figure it out and talked to a competent person in the US. Things are so different now.
