My Dream

Ok - dreaming is not exactly something that you would think to see as a blog topic.

I had a dream last night that I was trying to get an Okidata dot-matrix printer to work properly via a RS232 connection. The printer would work fine until you took the printer offline and then it would loose information (i.e. lines of text). It wasn't a difficult problem to say the least. Even though the customer and service guy said everything was set up properly, I was weaving my way through the RS232 setup menus on the printer. The problem was exactly what I expected. The flow control was not set properly. So even though the printer was taken offline, the server kept sending it data.

What a dream... just like being taken back into a time machine. The printer seemed real and all the RS232 configuration settings were there - just like it was in 1995. Flow control and bad RS232 cables were some of the leading problem of that eventually perculated up and had to be resolved by someone in Engineering.

When I woke up, I had a new appreciation for all those engineers who have made USB such a robust way of connecting devices to computers. Gone are all those cryptic settings. You just plug it in and it works. Awesome!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!