"Nico de Jong" wrote: Sorry, no. I mean the rubber "O" ring on the hub - the one that gets compressed and holds the tape reel on the hub. -brad

I assume that means you want a right angle connector and not the straight one ... but you need to be clearer. They come in preset lengths too, although that probably matters less for you. FWIW I always ran the VAX 4000s in the lab without the doors attached (much easier to fiddle with them that way). Removing and reattaching the doors is pretty straightforward. In the (unlikely?) event that you have a rack unit, you can deskin two VAX 4000s and mount them "back to back" in a normal rack to produce a neat compact cluster. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

meltie wrote: I can do you an AUI cable, but it'd be a "normal", non-right-angle one. Let me know if that'd be OK. Send clearance dimensions if you can! -- John Honniball coredump(a)gifford.co.uk

My recollection is that if you want the door to shut you need the right-angle variant. This would have been with a VAX 4000-300 and VAX 4000-500 style CPU cover in a BA4xx but I expect that a a VAX 4000-200 in a BA430(?) or a BA200-series cab would have a similar requirement. You don't want the cable to be squashed (apart from anything it might do to the cable, it won't do the flimsy door catch any good!) Sadly, I don't think I have a right-angled one any more. Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org

Provided the wire is short, you don't need a pukka cable. I once built an AUI cable from two DB15 connectors and about eight inches of random 15-pin ribbon cable I had lying around. (I first tried it with some six or eight feet of the same ribbon cable, but the error rate was insane. But six to eight inches is short enough that at 10Mb speeds the impedance bump becomes invisible.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Actually, it's a DA15 (the DB15 doesn't exist AFAIK), and normally has the standard slidelock latches. I had to make an AUI cable for my PERQ. That machines has normal screw-down jackposts on the ethernet connector (it's an otherwise-standard DA15, with the standard pinout). So I had to make up a special cable with screwlocks on the male end and a slidelock on the female end. The only difficult bit to find was the cable. Plenty of places would sell me a 100m reel of it, but I only wanted a couple of metres. In the end I found a freindly network guy who gave me an offcut. IIRC it had a brown outer jacket (just as another data point!). The cable is 4 twisted pairs, but one of them (the power pair) is supposed to be thicher, to carry more current (obviously the characteristic impedance of the power lines doesn't matter!). -tony

DA = the one that's the same size as a Mac video connector (or PC joystick port). DE = the one that's the same size as a PC 9 pin serial port (FWIW, the following exist. Normal High Density DE9 DE15 DA15 DA26 DB25 DB44 DC37 DC62 DD50 I beleive other ones have existed for special applications (particularly high density DC shells with a few more than 62 pins!) Some typical uses : DE9 : PC/AT serial port, Apple //e gamess port, PC MDA/CGA/EGA video DA15 : AUI port, PC Joystick port, Mac video, Beeb analogue port DB25 : Real RS232 port, PC Centronics port, Mac SCSI port DC37 : PC ex4ernal floppy connector, Canon CX-VDO interface DD50 : (old) Sun SCSI port DE15 : PC VGA video DA26 : never seen it used DB44 : Ditto DC62 : PC Expansion chassis connector THey're used for plenty of other things, so please don't moan that I've not mentioned your favourite machine there (I suspect if I said things like 'DA15 : PERQ video sync/keboard/mouse signals, it would help nobody). I am trying to mention machines that you're likely to have seen. I';ve also seen DF19 (Atari ST DMA port?) and DG23 (Amiga video connector) refered to as such, but I am not sure those are official. The letter gives the shell size. -tony

Precisely -tony

Speaking of interesting D-shell connectors, I have another sighting of the DC37: I have a Magma SBus card that has what I assume is a DC37M on the card and a DC37F on its octopus cable (which isn't strictly an _octo_pus cable, as it breaks out into only three cables: two DB25M serial and one DB25F parallel). I say "I assume" because I'm not certain, in view of the DD50's three rows of pins, that this thing actually is what you mean by a DC37 - it's DE9/DA15/DB25 width and pin spacing, but stretched out until it's 37 pins long. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Tony Duell wrote: INMOS used them on the back of the B300 box as a differential transputer link connector. The B300 would have four DA26 sockets, one for each of the four links. It then had an ethernet AUI port for connection to a TCP/IP network. -- John Honniball coredump(a)gifford.co.uk

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: I'm guessing that when they came up with DA, DB, DC, and DD, (and called them "SUB-miniature"!), that it didn't occur to them that eventually some even smaller sizes would be needed. IOW, the sequence is chronological! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 11:05:50PM +0000, Tony Duell wrote: I have a Cisco AGS+ router (big box with, I think, Multibus slots) and a quad low-speed (i.e., not 1.544Mbps) card. The connectors on the back are DA26s and I have no cables. :-( These are *not* the same as the newer Cisco cables with pins on a square grid. I have a Planar-brand 486 with built-in flatpanel, internal 2.5" IDE drive, one ISA slot, PCMCIA, optional onboard 10Base2 NIC, etc, with a DB25 external floppy connector and a DB44 external IDE CD-ROM connector. I megged out the floppy port and built a cable for it. Since I don't have any DB44 cables, I never bothered figuring out the pinout for the CD-ROM. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 06-Mar-2004 01:58 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -60.1 F (-51.2 C) Windchill -60.1 F (-51.2 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 3.1 kts Grid 129 Barometer 678.6 mb (10679. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Paul Koning wrote: It's nothing to be ashamed of, MOST of the public is ignorant about that. wrong That's RIGHT! The original (5150) PC used a 25 pin connector (DB25), but not all of the signals were always used. Therefore, a DB25 that implements 1-8 and 20 would be a DB9! WRONG. It is a COMMON misconception. So common that the clueless clerk at Radio Shack never heard of the difference, and most suppliers don't CARE about the "correct" designation. Very similar in its level of acceptance to thinking that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, or that a megabyte is 1000000 bytes. (and 1024000 bytes in a megabyte indicates a total lack of intelligence) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

That's because the DB shell size was the most common (DB25 is used for real RS232 ports and PC parallel ports), so some people decided that _all_ such connectors are called 'DBn'. But the letter really indicates the shell size (there are 5 standard ones, and 2 (at least) less standard ones). In which case DB15 means both the AUI conenctor and the PC VGA connector. And yet they're very different! (the former is a DA15, the latter a DE15, of course) -tony

I know i'm replying to my own post but I had a private email querying these. I should of explained better, the ipx machines I own have a aui tranceiver mounted internally with a ribbon cable which goes from the outside of the case to the connector and then plugs in the back of the transceiver. I assume these was an after market option. But the ribbon cable will plug into the vax and allow the tranceiver to dangle inside the box. Dan