Invisible wrote:

> 
> What, you'd like the CPU to teleport itself into the socket instead? :-D
> 

Remember the days before ZIF sockets? Seat the processor, jam it down 
with enough pressure to potentially crack the main board, and hope to 
hell you didn't just bend half a dozen pins. Ohh, and there were also 
fun memory upgrades, using individual DIP chips crammed into sockets. 
And god forbid if you had to remove one... Then there was SIP modules, 
with their delicate pins which you had to align precisely or you'd bend 
one. SIMMs and DIMMs are a much better improvement, especially with the 
lift and snap-in insertion that many have today. The straight down syle 
still required some pressure to get them to click in, but removal is a 
breeze.

> 
> In the Old Days, if you suddenly plugged or unplugged a device, you 
> would likely fry the interface circuitry. Today we use interfaces that 
> are expressedly designed to support such actions. That one is purely a 
> hardware thing. (Although obviously the software needs to support it too.)
> 

Oh, you still can, today .. see above.  That is the nice thing about USB 
is that devices are hot-swappable. Of course, so are devices that hang 
off of the serial port, or parallel port. (and they have been for a very 
long time ...)

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