I didn't notice that last post didn't include any quoting. Meant to reply to Josh, and neither contradicting nor adding to what Mike already said.
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Brian White <[email protected]> wrote: > It's wired as DTE, but with a female connector. *That's* what makes it > backwards, not merely the female connector by itself. > > If it were a female connector, and wired as DCE, that would be unusual for > a computer, but it would still be conforming to the same conventions as > everything else. > > When you buy a random serial cable with male pins in a 25 pin connector, > if you know nothing about the insides of the cable or where it came from or > what the original packaging said etc, 99 44/100ths of the time that > combination expects to be plugged into a modem, or other DCE device. The > M100 isn't a modem, but if it's connector were wired DCE, that "modem" > cable would still work. > > *today* such a plug would have an extra dimension of wrongness because it > would be ambiguous with a printer port, but at that time, D25F might not > yet have become a standard for parallel printer ports. It doesn't matter > that the printer port on the M100 itself isn't confusable with it's own > serial port, it's still a factor as long as a significant number of > printers and their cables out there can physically plug in to the wrong > port. At the time, that might not have been true like it absolutely is > today. > >
