HDD on Parallel Port

[toncho11]

This article discusses HDD on the parallel port. It works for XT machines with a DOS driver.

https://unitedandco.net/2021/09/20/paradisk-250-a-hard-disk-drive-for-the-printer-port/

Some XT machines did not have HDD, so this is a nice add-on.

[toncho11]

I was thinking what about connecting an Arduino class device on the parallel port with a lot of internal memory. I quickly checked that there is a STM32 with 192KB of SRAM (for code and data, not flash memory). So in theory one could connect to the SMT32 and use these 192KB. It could be used directly by the kernel as "slow memory" or swap file memory. Question is how slow will the communication be. Speed is said to be 150 kB/s for the old parallel ports. So a 20kb process will be written 133ms ...