Lost on LAN line

[dhouston]

After a while it is impractical to use ancient PCs as they wear out and fail too. New PCs can be had for 4-500 USD and that beats going Salvation Army shopping. but as Bert stated the ECP and other options have been killed (Thank's Mr. Gates).

I keep one very old PC going because of my Protek 220 oscilloscope card. I bought the motherboard just as ISA was disappearing from new PCs. It has ISA, PCI and one AGP slot so I'm able to use newer graphics cards and monitors with it.

Controller cards which have Parallel ports are still available for pci bus.

Even for ISA - I usually deal with Byterunner because they've proven to be very knowledgeable over the years but I assume Bert is hoping to future-proof his design and, as you said, ancient PCs wear out.

I think I'd be looking at Single Board Computers for this application.