1 Aug
2013
1 Aug
'13
5:05 p.m.
On Thu, 1 Aug 2013, Tony Duell wrote:
But, in this case, it worked! Whew!
And thus is born "Industry standard cassette cable"
Another point : Since IBM picked a 'type A'
(180 degree) 5 pin DIN socket
for the casette port so you could use the Radio Shack cable, why did they
use the same connector for the keyboard. Why not a 5 pin type B (240
degree) DIN socket there, which was originally designed ot be sued where
it was desirable to have a socket a normal audio cable would not plug in
to.
They used two identical connectors for vastly different purposes, because
Radio Shack had done the same with THREE connectors.
That let them show the world that they were so big that they had no
intention of learning from somebody else's mistakes.
When my
employer purchased on on the first day of availability, we
didn't even think to ask. We noticed that the connector was the same
as the TRS-80, so we tried a cable we already had, and were pleasantly
surprised that it worked.
This is the sort of attitude which ends up giving
Centronics printers
RS232 levels using PC printer cables... :-)