Your motherboard still has “useless” headers from the 1990s, and licensing agreements are to blame
They were a free gift that nobody really wants to get rid of.
Your motherboard still houses "useless" legacy headers from the 1990s, and licensing agreements are to blame. These headers, including Serial (COM), Parallel (LPT), and PS/2 ports, were included due to Intel's Low Pin Count (LPC) interface, which aimed to retire the more pin-intensive Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. Intel encouraged adoption of LPC by making it a royalty-free technology, leading many manufacturers to integrate it into their Super I/O chips.
These chips, which include features like monitoring fan speed and temperature sensors, still support the now-obsolete headers, despite their limited use in modern PCs. The Trusted Computing Group utilized the LPC bus to support its TPM 1.2 chip, but TPM 1.2's poor security practices led to its decline. Despite this, the LPC bus and its associated headers remain in modern motherboards due to the minimal cost of including them and the lack of incentive to remove them.
Written by urgent.news from XDA Developers's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
