27 Aug
2001
27 Aug
'01
2:21 p.m.
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Tony Duell wrote:
"The great thing about standards is that everyone can have a unique one
of their own." -- George Morrow
Does ANYONE here have a copy of "Quotations of Chairman Morrow"?
IIRC the early bus mice used a DE9 connector
(female on the card). But I
am still wondering how the TTL level inputs and a +5V line on a bus mouse
port would damage TTL level inputs on a CGA monitor.
They are large color monitors. We still use some of them for VCR display.
The [consistent] symptom was that after the damage, when switched over to
their composite/NTSC mode, they would have unstable vertical hold. I can
get you the model number tomorrow, and on Thursday I can ask the fellow
who repaired them whether he remembers the details. He told me that the
damage was identical on all of them. The PROBLEM was an instructor who
plugged the connector into one port after another as a method for figuring
out which port was the right one. At that time, our classroom machines
(5150) had CGA and Microsoft Bus Mouse.
IBM were one
of those bastards who introduced the non-DB25 serial ports. Which
is a real bother since there is no real D9 serial standard pinout. IBM use
one, Apple used one, HP another and Luxor a fourth.
And DEC had yet another
one....
It annoys me when people talk about a 'standard 9 pin serial port'
because there really is no such thing... Back a long time ago, one of our instructors damaged
the input circuitry
of of several giant classroom CGA compatible monitors by plugging them
into the Microsoft Bus [green-eyed] Mouse ports
How would you plug a CGA monitor
(D9) into a bus mouse port (mini-DIN)? The most amusing (after the event) version of that was
the idiot who
connected the BNC on the back of a VT220 to a thinwire ethernet network.
No, it didn't do any lasting damage, but needless to say the network went
down...
We had somebody connect a monitor that had BNC to a network card in a PC.
(For a long time, our administrators considered lab staff to be a warmbody
job)
Ageed. I don't know what this objection is to
labelling things.
He didn't object to labelling, so much as wrong ("3.5" Hard disk A:), or
silly labels ("5.25" floppy drive"). I have seen IEC cords that have
labels attached saying "power cord", "this end to computer", and
"power
cord for ..." on a generic IEC cord.
I had an office worker briefly who labelled some file folders. I drew the
line when she wrote on one: "This folder contains information about
printers from Epson" instead of "Epson printers".
OTOH, I think that labelling the drive letter is reasonable, and I would
appreciate labels differentiating 720K v 1.4M, and 360K v 1.2M.
Bounced Reality Check quiz: what was backward about IBM's attempt to label
360K v 1.2M?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com