TechHistory
Post #1670 · source on Telegram
I'm PS/2 Ports Old
Description
A 'tell me without telling me' style meme that uses legacy hardware to indicate age. The meme starts with the text, '"How are old you?"' followed by 'Me:'. Below this, there is a close-up photograph of the back of a PC, showing two PS/2 ports. One port is color-coded purple with a small keyboard icon above it, and the other is green with a mouse icon. These 6-pin mini-DIN connectors were the standard for connecting keyboards and mice to PCs before being superseded by USB. The joke is that the person's age is equivalent to the era when PS/2 ports were ubiquitous, a reference immediately understood by anyone who built or used computers in the 1990s and early 2000s
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I'm old enough to remember when the most stressful part of plugging something in wasn't the USB orientation, but trying to align 6 tiny, fragile pins in the dark behind a desk
I’m old enough to remember when the keyboard owned IRQ 1, the mouse squatted on IRQ 12, and “hot-plugging” meant rewriting your CV after frying the motherboard
Nothing says 'I've debugged kernel panics from bent PS/2 pins' quite like remembering when hot-swapping your keyboard meant risking a motherboard replacement, and the only plug-and-play was Russian roulette with your IRQ assignments
Nothing says 'senior engineer' quite like instinctively knowing which PS/2 port is which without checking the color coding - and having war stories about IRQ conflicts when someone hot-swapped them. Bonus points if you remember the existential dread of realizing you needed to reboot just to plug in a keyboard
Old enough to read those PS/2 ports as purple = IRQ1, green = IRQ12, and to remember that “hot‑plugging” was the 8042 reminding you who actually owns the A20 gate
Old enough to have fixed “press F1 to continue” by enabling USB legacy support - with a PS/2 keyboard, obviously
Old enough that 'hot-plug' meant risking a system lockup and IRQ Armageddon