Was to be submitted to a post on some forum... Dude was *blessed* to (still) be taking a class where low-level programming of parallel ports was taught... And was downright obnoxious about it... "Because I live in 2011."

Yeahp... this is nothing but a rant...

LOL, attitudes like these are why we have super-computers thousands of times more powerful than took us to the moon--hundreds of times more powerful than those that rendered Toy Story--in our pockets to be dropped in toilets when we're dissatisfied with what we've got, rather'n someone's finally, for godsakes, recognizing that we already have far more than enough, if we'd quit pretending we know more than the previous generation, and winding up subjecting everyone, including the previous experts, do the newly-designed square wheel, to slowly chisel those corners once again. Seriously, when computers were *dozens* of times less powerful, we had multi-level undo, undo-histories where a single step in the history could be removed or modified, and all those following still applied... when computers were *hundreds* of times less powerful, we had undo and redo (to, yahknow, undo an undo). And here in an era of super-super-computers we'd be friggin' lucky if by installing an app from a questionable source that requires opening up security holes on one of our single most important devices in our lives, we *might* get access to a CTRL key on our screen, that *might* give us the ability to *try* CTRL-Z... which we have to do since, attitudes like these decided generations' worth of experience somehow was completely worthless in this new era... wherein menus were deemed old-tech in favor of context-sensitive-menus (which were a great invention, akin to the screwdriver after the hammer, not a replacement a DIFFERENT tool), which were then deemed old-tech in favor of (what?!). Meanwhile, hundreds of CPU-Powers less than we have now also had *multitasking*... and now that we have hyperthreading and multiple-cores, we can't even have two damned windows running side-by-side, because that's too "old-school"... AT EASE mofos! (look it up).
Seriously; yeah, maybe networking isn't the best class to be teaching fundamentals like these (inport, outport)... But, you should, instead of being so friggin' cocky, take a moment to step back and say "hmm, maybe this is an opportunity to learn something". Because, frankly, no matter how much you virtualize our systems, no matter how many layers of [hardware/software] abstraction you throw at our systems, Someone, Somewhere, actually has to understand how to interface the friggin' Power/Charge LED with your multi-core ARM 2GHz processor. This is your chance to learn it, something very few are exposed to these days, and you think you're somehow above that. And, worse, completely disregard the fact that it still exists and will continue to as long as hardware and firmware exists. 
And then, to top it off, you're too damned busy to be bothered to visit the lab where the systems are at your disposal *waiting* to be used... A lab where you could in fact be learning these *rare* opportunities *alongside* others, and instead, choose to figure out *extremely* difficult methods to emulate something you don't understand in the first place.
And if that ain't enough. It's folks like you, with attitudes like yours, that have made it damned-near impossible for folks with *decades* of experience, *decades* of TOOL-development/improvements to make use of the TOOLs they've developed over decades... Why? Because y'all don't give a flying rat's ass about backwards-compatibility, even when someone like me comes around and shoves it in your face that it's not *backwards* compatibility *at all*, but LOW LEVEL compatibility, which, again, will exist as long an an LED or pushbutton needs to be interfaced with any sort of software.
'cause some asshole like you will be a manager somewhere some day saying "why are we bothering with keyboard scancodes, when all our keyboards are USB or bluetooth?" completely forgetting that IN that USB or bluetooth keyboard is A PROCESSOR, a processor interacting with pushbuttons and LEDs at the level of INP and OUTP.
I want my multitasking back. Fuck your multi-threading within a single application. I WANTED multitasking *AND* multi-threading. So much for that, eh? I want my Undo back, fuck your lack thereof. And I wanted to see further progress in mult-level history-based undo. I want my Context-sensitive menus AND my menu-bar with multiple menus (File, Edit, View...), because once we had only a hammer, and it was a pretty good hammer, but then we had both the hammer and the screwdriver, and things were looking up... Then some asshole decided to get rid of the hammer altogether... Then some later asshole basically decided to get rid of screwdrivers, too... "because, it's 2010, yo!"
And, again, for a brief period we had both touchscreens *and* penabled computers... We literally had pens that could achieve sub-pixel resolution on our laptops... could detect the tilt/angle of the pen, the pressure, and still do-so at fractional-pixel resolutions on laptops also containing touchscreens for those moments when 20-30pixels' worth of resolution doesn't really matter (like, when? Like when they decided a friggin' Icon needed to be 200 pixels wide to fit our fat fingers!).  Then not only did they get rid of the multi-axis pressure-sensitive sub-pixel pen, then they did away with the friggin' MOUSE! And not only did they do away with the mouse/touchpad for fine-control, but they did away with the danged arrow-keys! So now, when you touch, with your fat finger, a piece of text to edit, and it puts the cursor two lines up and three characters over... there's nothing you can do except, again, install some shady-ass software to replace your onscreen-already-too-small-finger-touch-keyboard with one even smaller just to have arrow-keys!
But, yahknow, "get with it, it's 2019!"
(Oh yeah, we once had a middle-button, too... It was QUITE HANDY. And, like the right-button, we could actually BOTH click AND drag with it... but y'all of your generation wouldn't know that).
So, yahknow, if you want to pretend like direct port-access is "so 1980", completely disregarding its importance to those fancy-ass blue LEDs in your case-mod, or the friggin' keys on your keyboard, then you're more than welcome to run At Ease. But, forgodsakes, please don't develop software for future generations, or worse, past.LOL, attitudes like these are why we have super-computers thousands of times more powerful than took us to the moon--hundreds of times more powerful than those that rendered Toy Story--in our pockets to be dropped in toilets when we're dissatisfied with what we've got, rather'n someone's finally, for godsakes, recognizing that we already have far more than enough, if we'd quit pretending we know more than the previous generation, and winding up subjecting everyone, including the previous experts, do the newly-designed square wheel, to slowly chisel those corners once again. Seriously, when computers were *dozens* of times less powerful, we had multi-level undo, undo-histories where a single step in the history could be removed or modified, and all those following still applied... when computers were *hundreds* of times less powerful, we had undo and redo (to, yahknow, undo an undo). And here in an era of super-super-computers we'd be friggin' lucky if by installing an app from a questionable source that requires opening up security holes on one of our single most important devices in our lives, we *might* get access to a CTRL key on our screen, that *might* give us the ability to *try* CTRL-Z... which we have to do since, attitudes like these decided generations' worth of experience somehow was completely worthless in this new era... wherein menus were deemed old-tech in favor of context-sensitive-menus (which were a great invention, akin to the screwdriver after the hammer, not a replacement a DIFFERENT tool), which were then deemed old-tech in favor of (what?!). Meanwhile, hundreds of CPU-Powers less than we have now also had *multitasking*... and now that we have hyperthreading and multiple-cores, we can't even have two damned windows running side-by-side, because that's too "old-school"... AT EASE mofos! (look it up).
Seriously; yeah, maybe networking isn't the best class to be teaching fundamentals like these (inport, outport)... But, you should, instead of being so friggin' cocky, take a moment to step back and say "hmm, maybe this is an opportunity to learn something". Because, frankly, no matter how much you virtualize our systems, no matter how many layers of [hardware/software] abstraction you throw at our systems, Someone, Somewhere, actually has to understand how to interface the friggin' Power/Charge LED with your multi-core ARM 2GHz processor. This is your chance to learn it, something very few are exposed to these days, and you think you're somehow above that. And, worse, completely disregard the fact that it still exists and will continue to as long as hardware and firmware exists. 
And then, to top it off, you're too damned busy to be bothered to visit the lab where the systems are at your disposal *waiting* to be used... A lab where you could in fact be learning these *rare* opportunities *alongside* others, and instead, choose to figure out *extremely* difficult methods to emulate something you don't understand in the first place.
And if that ain't enough. It's folks like you, with attitudes like yours, that have made it damned-near impossible for folks with *decades* of experience, *decades* of TOOL-development/improvements to make use of the TOOLs they've developed over decades... Why? Because y'all don't give a flying rat's ass about backwards-compatibility, even when someone like me comes around and shoves it in your face that it's not *backwards* compatibility *at all*, but LOW LEVEL compatibility, which, again, will exist as long an an LED or pushbutton needs to be interfaced with any sort of software.
'cause some asshole like you will be a manager somewhere some day saying "why are we bothering with keyboard scancodes, when all our keyboards are USB or bluetooth?" completely forgetting that IN that USB or bluetooth keyboard is A PROCESSOR, a processor interacting with pushbuttons and LEDs at the level of INP and OUTP.
I want my multitasking back. Fuck your multi-threading within a single application. I WANTED multitasking *AND* multi-threading. So much for that, eh? I want my Undo back, fuck your lack thereof. And I wanted to see further progress in mult-level history-based undo. I want my Context-sensitive menus AND my menu-bar with multiple menus (File, Edit, View...), because once we had only a hammer, and it was a pretty good hammer, but then we had both the hammer and the screwdriver, and things were looking up... Then some asshole decided to get rid of the hammer altogether... Then some later asshole basically decided to get rid of screwdrivers, too... "because, it's 2010, yo!"
And, again, for a brief period we had both touchscreens *and* penabled computers... We literally had pens that could achieve sub-pixel resolution on our laptops... could detect the tilt/angle of the pen, the pressure, and still do-so at fractional-pixel resolutions on laptops also containing touchscreens for those moments when 20-30pixels' worth of resolution doesn't really matter (like, when? Like when they decided a friggin' Icon needed to be 200 pixels wide to fit our fat fingers!).  Then not only did they get rid of the multi-axis pressure-sensitive sub-pixel pen, then they did away with the friggin' MOUSE! And not only did they do away with the mouse/touchpad for fine-control, but they did away with the danged arrow-keys! So now, when you touch, with your fat finger, a piece of text to edit, and it puts the cursor two lines up and three characters over... there's nothing you can do except, again, install some shady-ass software to replace your onscreen-already-too-small-finger-touch-keyboard with one even smaller just to have arrow-keys!
But, yahknow, "get with it, it's 2019!"
(Oh yeah, we once had a middle-button, too... It was QUITE HANDY. And, like the right-button, we could actually BOTH click AND drag with it... but y'all of your generation wouldn't know that).
So, yahknow, if you want to pretend like direct port-access is "so 1980", completely disregarding its importance to those fancy-ass blue LEDs in your case-mod, or the friggin' keys on your keyboard, then you're more than welcome to run At Ease. But, forgodsakes, please don't develop software for future generations, or worse, past.

Meh... I found a quirk, here... apparently it pasted twice. But I'll be damned if I'mma try to use my fat finger to select the duplicate.