The mini DIN 4 port is ADB for mice, keyboards and a small number of other peripherals, mostly joysticks. LaCie made a radio that for some reason required an ADB connection. You can network (slowly) Macs together with the modem or printer ports. You need either Apple's own adapters that have two mini DIN 3 connectors and the matching 3 wire cables or you can use PhoneNet adapters and ordinary phone cables. You'll also need a pair of terminator plugs for the ends of the PhoneNet chain. One neat thing about PhonNet (and a big selling point) was your house is already wired for it. It uses the pair of wires not used when you have just a single landline. Plug in a PhoneNet adapter with one port having a terminator plug then connect to a phone wall jack with a standard phone cord. Connect every old Mac you have that way and no need to string cables everywhere. If you have two landlines, you can't use the existing phone wiring for PhoneNet. :-( There were also a couple of accelerated (and of course mutually incompatible) versions of the system, and the Farallon EtherWave which connected the Mac serial port to Ethernet. Extra goodness was achieved by being able to daisy chain like LocalTalk and PhoneNet (and coaxial cable networks) OR work in a star topology with an Ethernet hub. All networking methods using the serial ports top out at less than 1 megabit per second. No streaming Internet video that way!
http://lowendmac.com/2014/farallon-etherwave-faq/ From: Daz Botron <[email protected]> To: Vintage Macs <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2016 7:10 PM Subject: Re: Getting Software on to a Vintage Mac Oh, one more thing. What is the designation of the cable used to connect two macs together? It looks like an s-video cable but I don't think it's actually the same. -- -- ----- You received this message because you are a member of the Vintage Macs group. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/vintagemacs.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vintage-macs Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vintage Macs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
