OT: Please pass the connectors!

Yeah,,,this friend of mine is moving out of state and gave me a large box of computer parts. Mostly old, obsolete cables.

I pulled a few scsi cards out of the box and left it in the alley for the scavengers....next day it was gone.

I have several hundred pounds of cables with various connector combinations.

SCSI connectors with combinations of the following on either end:

- 25 pin SCSI (D shell)

- HDB-50 (Old SUN/DG)

- Centronics 50 (SCSI-1)

- MD50 (SCSI-2)

- MD68 (Wide SCSI 2)

- VHDCI68

- HDI-30 (Mac)

- HDCN60 (IBM) I.e., *lots* of different combinations (inline adapters cause impedance mismatches that affect signal integrity)

RG58 coax (10Base2)

Video cables with combinations of the following on either end:

- HDE15 ("VGA")

- 13W3 (Sun/SGI)

- 5BNC (high end monitors)

- 3BNC (w/SoG)

- DA15 (Old Apple)

- DE9 (CGA)

- DVI-D

- miniDVI

- LFH-59 (dual monitor)

- "RCA"

- SCART (not all combinations are legal)

Plus all sorts of "proprietary" connector combinations (e.g., USB to stereo plug)

The beauty of computer standards - there are so many to choose from!!

"Standards are great; everybody should have one!"

I have CDO. It's like OCD, but in alphabetical order, like it should be.

My favorite is from back in the days of edge connector cards and back planes -- the STD Bus. The acronym reportedly stood for Simple To Design because there was nothing standard about it. I was contracting with a company with a bad case of NIH so I got to design yet another card bus for them. Life was much simpler back then.

I'm currently working on a YAFI -- Yet Another F**king Interface. I laugh when I read about the interoperability of Federal and local agencies. I've never hit one yet that didn't have their own flavor of XML or JSON to be sent to their own little SOAP web service, RESTful interface, something based on XMPP, or a completely unique socket based protocol. One site uses a mostly obsolete IBM mainframe protocol with EBCDIC encoding.

Keeps me in a job, I guess... Sad thing was after 9/11 there was a big push to get everybody on the same page. 15 years and counting.

Be thankful -- I'm redesigning Memory Management API's (WTF? Hasn't that been beaten to death?)

When I toured the Cheyenne Mountain Complex (very late 70's, early 80's?), they were just installing new computers -- ordered in the 60's!

rbowman posted for all of us...

Don't hold your breath waiting. The county I am in went with surrounding counties to interface the radio systems. When the call is dispatched to another county you will hear: go on fg5 it's patched to cty#2.

Moneyrola gets big bux for making everything different.

I have a friend who spent his entire career at USDA trying to integrate roughly two dozen incompatible database management systems into one unified system. When he left, there were roughly 2 dozen incompatible database systems. Granted they were not the same systems he started with but they still would not talk to each other. It is simply empire building at it's finest. If the other guy can use your data, your empire is at risk so they build walls between them.

Private industry is not much better. When I was at IBM, we had to carry 35-40 different allen, bristol, torx and similar "L" wrenches. We only used about 8 different sized set screws but nobody could decide on a standard head for each. Everyone had a "better" idea.