<story><title>Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W1t2_EJG9w</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>a2tech</author><text>The ISA bus was really a very approachable way to add hardware to a system. I worked at a place where a couple of electrical engineers wanted to build a bridge from a PC to a specialized industrial control network. So, with very little knowledge of computer programming (they were low level guys) or bus technologies they banged out an ISA card and an application to throw bytes out onto the network. Since ISA cards basically just showed up in memory space you just told the application they wrote which chunk of memory it was using and the application wrote to a specific offset to write data to the network and read from another offset to see what came back in.&lt;p&gt;They had a pretty successful little business from that idea. And those cards were STILL selling pretty well into the early 00&amp;#x27;s--I think they sold them until 2008. Of course the application was never updated and you couldn&amp;#x27;t just write to random memory locations post Windows 95...so thats the only OS (and DOS) that I ever saw that card run on.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W1t2_EJG9w</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>RALaBarge</author><text>I saw this video yesterday -- cool to see it pop up here today.&lt;p&gt;I also watched this Defcon breakdown on hardware hacking where the presenter goes over the specialized tools to both mount the chips as well as the software to pull firmware at rest to reverse engineer it. Video: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Kxvpbu9STU4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=Kxvpbu9STU4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;YouTube channels like My Mate Vince, Northridge Fix, Necroware, and others show folks without any electronics degrees troubleshooting and fixing hardware and I just can&amp;#x27;t help but want to watch them and think about how fun it would be to get involved...unfortunately I already am at a limit to my hobbies.&lt;p&gt;The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about EE topics and wondering where I would be today if I would have found out more about this discipline vs going a more traditional administration&amp;#x2F;IT route.</text></comment>