15 Aug
2010
15 Aug
'10
1:26 a.m.
On 8/14/10 8:14 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
IBM certainly played the standard violation game as
well, but somehow
the DE9 serial issue is no big deal. Order or make cable Z, and the
problem is solved.
DE-9 serial ports!! *spit*
OK, yes, I suppose it is a bit early, so I will take
that back (but,
come on, lighten up a bit. Did I touch a nerve?). I was told that
DEC's reason is that too many people were confusing things that use RJ
connectors. However, it was pretty clear at the time that RJs were
going to be a hit. Serial went there, and even token ring.
Modular connectors date back to early 1973. They were adopted in the
telephony world pretty quickly, but there wasn't that much of an overlap
between that world and the world of computing. (nowhere near as much as
in later years, I mean)
AT&T StarLAN predates 10baseT Ethernet, and I seem to recall it using
modular connectors as well, but I don't know when it came into being. I
only started seeing mention of it in the mid-1980s. Perhaps that
could've been a source of the confusion DEC was trying to address with MMJ.
That said, though, while the sequence of events largely precludes that
motivation stemming from confusion involving 10baseT in particular, it
was a good thing to do. Perhaps they should've done it in a different
way, using a different standard connector if they really didn't want
DB-25s (which they SHOULD have used), but look at all the trouble we're
still having on TODAY between 10/100/1000baseT Ethernet and serial ports
on networking equipment, and even other types of connections. Just a
few months ago I unplugged a T1 (RJ48X, the same connector as an RJ45)
from the serial CONSOLE port on a Cisco and plugged it
back into its T1
WIC card. The "tech" had gotten them mixed up.
So yes, all over the industry we have connector confusion problems
primarily because people refuse to pay attention to what they're doing.
I'd dearly love to see 120V AC power delivered on 1/8" headphone jacks
for a few years...just to clean up the gene pool a bit.
Yes, it has ended. Monochome CRTs have not been made
for quite a few
years now. "New" production terminals are using refurbished tubes.
Also, I bet the number of new dumb terminals being ordered these days
is tiny, and it would not surprise me if what is being sold today as
new is just old stock from the warehouses. I is a whole lot cheaper to
store a few thousand terminals in a warehouse than it is to keep a
very slow production line open, with the bonus that unsold stock can
be written off and scrapped.
I have a mono VGA CRT here that was purchased new less than a year
ago. I suppose its CRT could've been a refurb.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL