They keep this 20+ year old laptop around because it has a serial port and every now and then that comes in handy.
You can’t really see it in the picture but the laptop is pretty thick and heavy.
I still have my old Lenovo X61T which is nearly as old. With maxed out RAM (4GB) and an SSD it is actually still quite usable (running Linux). I love its great keyboard, that’s the reason I kept it. At some time my kids discovered that it is still able to run Minetest at reduced settings and so it now is part of the occasional LAN-Party when friends are over. Opens my heart to see the old buddy right in the middle of action being used by a bunch of kids that are only slightly over half its age!
In shockingly good condition too!
Though if you wanted to part ways with it, you can pick up an FTDI USB serial adapter for cheap. Though if it has a parallel port, hold on it it. Parallel ports USB adapters are just printer adapters and don’t work for general parallel port use.
USB serial adapters sometimes have compatibility issues. Hardware serial ports have interrupts, while USB serial ports can only be polled at a limited rate.
There are serial and parallel PCIe cards available that work much better than the USB adapters. Some modern desktop motherboards still have a serial port, but it’s usually a pin header that will need an adapter to connect to. There is also a nearly pocket sized laptop with a serial port and more connectors than many full size laptops have.