Oh my. He built an RS-232 ring topology by breaking
the normal tx/rcv
pairings out to different destinations.
That is so gross, yet so cool.
Agreed!
This actually reminds me of something I've been contemplating doing:
"the same thing" for twisted-pair Ethernet. That is....
For two machines, with a crossed cable, machine A's 1/2 pair goes to
machine B's 3/6 pair, and conversely.
But suppose you have three machines, and connect machine A's 1/2 to
machine B's 3/6, B's 1/2 to C's 3/6, and C's 1/2 to A's 3/6.
Obviously
you'd have to set all interfaces involved half-duplex for it to have
any hope of working (so each non-sending host will feed through the
signal it gets to the next host in the ring)...but will it work if you
do that? Clearly, too many hosts in the ring and you'll start getting
late collisions and such. But it could be a similarly "gross but cool"
way to run a small LAN hubless, something normally not possible with
more than two machines....
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