17 Oct
2006
17 Oct
'06
7:39 p.m.
On 10/18/06, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
I've never completely understood Black Box's
business model. Some of the
adapters and cables they sell at a premium price are simply OEM'd products
with their own sticker/logo stuck on them. Did they offer some sort of
guarantee beyond what the manufacturer would have offered?
If I understand their business model, they charged a premium, but what
the customer gained was a single place to go (one catalog, one vendor
to send POs to, etc), and some "big name" reassurance.
In my experience, large companies deal with small companies poorly or
not at all. If a small company comes up with a nice comms-related
widget, they can try to sell it themselves with potentially mixed
success, or sell quantities in black enclosures through Black Box and
get instant exposure when the next catalog comes out.
I actually picked up an older but practically new
serial analyzer on eBay
this last month for about $10. Its a Datacom Technologies DataTool 5500,
which is both an analyzer and a breakout box built into one unit. (Datacom
Technologies either became Tempo or got bought up by them, I can't
remember now.) I believe it only works up to 38400 baud or so, but it will
work great for most stuff that I work with. Wish I'd had it back in the
mid 90s though ;)
I'm not familiar with that one. We had several analyzers (HP) and
BERT boxes (bit error-rate tester?) when I worked at Software Results
making sync comms hardware - fortunately I got to take my pick when
the doors closed. I still have a bunch of that kit, and it's still
useful since most of the gear does async as well as sync.
If your analyzer only goes to 38Kbps, it's probably async only. Sync
stuff I've worked with, tended to go up to 64Kbps or even 128Kbps (if
it wasn't designed for T1-like connections).
-ethan