18 Jun
2002
18 Jun
'02
12:43 p.m.
On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 13:38, Eric Smith wrote:
Does the black connector housing have ridges on the
top and bottom that
prevent a normal DE-9 from mating with it? Or signs that such ridges have
been filed off? If so, you have an early backplane. I wouldn't expect to
see that in a 2/10 or XL.
Not that I'm aware of, but I'll take a closer look. This is definitely
a later backplane as it lacks an external parallel port. I'm familar
only from memory of the earlier mice having some sort of 'clip' that
held the mouse in place. FYI - I have a M0100 mouse which I understand
isn't the 'proper' mouse.
To better visualize the mechanics of this, imagine a VGA connector (on
the card side) whithout the metal sheath, just the bare plastic - that's
what I have on the motherboard. The mouse doesn't appear to have been
modified - it has what would appear to be (physically) identical to a
DB-9 serial port (female).
So, it appears that something was modified on the motherboard connector,
but without some reference I don't know what's missing.
The early Lisa mice used a strange DE-9 variant
that I can't easily describe. In order to use the
later mice on it, you
had to either file off the ridges on the Lisa connector, or cut notches
in the metal shell of the mouse connector, and either way you ended up
with nothing to retain the connector.
Jeffrey H. Ingber (jingber _at_ ix.netcom.com)