Kermit! (shudder). I have some horrid memories of trying to deal with
non-universal serial buses like RS-232, transferring files using ZModem or LapLink. Kids today have no idea how lucky they are, now we have a Universal Serial Bus (USB) that does just about anything.
I remember that Linux used to make it really hard to access removable devices such as USB drives. On a secure multi-user system (which it is), no user should just be able to plug in a storage device and access it: it's a potential security hole. So the root user had to set up the device in advance and give it the required permissions. It's a lot easier these days, at least under the popular desktop distributions such as Ubuntu. You plug in a device as a "standard" user, it comes up mounted as /media/label, where the label is the label given to the drive under any OS. It's made backing up etc. a pleasure. But if I need to set up a secure system that can't access USB devices, I could just remove those "friendly" components.