err good grief yet another correction. I missed your very last line Josh, which obviates my entire post. "oh well" indeed ;)
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 6:18 PM, Brian White <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >> >> >
