PC floppy cable twists...

... discussion about this on another list got me curious - what *was* the point of that cable twist in a (IBM clone) PC floppy cable, when every other system on the planet was using straight-through cables? 1) Great, it means both drives in a system can be jumpered for the same ID - but someone's still got to go in and jumper/modify the last drive in the chain so that it's terminated, so it's not like the twist eliminates messing around with jumpers. 2) when the twist was introduced, there were presumably no clone machines around (it was there from day 1 IIRC) - and wouldn't the addition of a second floppy drive to an IBM machine have been a field service call anyway? So it's not like it was the general public changing jumpers, but a trained engineer... 3) IBM seemed to use a very small range of drives in the PC / XT / 286 days, so it's not like there'd be a million jumper combinations to figure out. If a customer tried to add their own drive rather than buying through IBM, surely IBM couldn't care less if they struggled to figure the drive jumpers on their 'non-standard' unit out? It's got me curious as it seems like a hack that doesn't completely solve any kind of problem whilst introducing a difference between IBM and the rest of the industry. cheers Jules