Connectors That Changed the World
outfunnel.com
outfunnel.com
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43tZ6DjuIE
His channel (which also has the original Machines series available):
Brakemen also had the unenviable job of running along the tops of the cars while the train was in motion, jumping the gaps to get to the brake wheels on each car. In fact, I’d argue that more important than the automatic coupler was the automatic continuous brake—particularly the Westhinghouse air brake and its gladhand connector, still used today on railways and semi-trailers—which was considerably safer (both for the brakemen and also for everyone else, since trains would now fail safe and stop if they broke) and made longer and faster trains possible.
I'll admit it took a bit for me to realise the horror of that joke, but boy howdy.
I'm rather glad we've moved beyond an era of business and government where traumatic amputations were considered an inevitable fact of life.
Properly implemented RS-232 is a thing of beauty, in a way that USB just can't be. It's a shame so many implementations (of both!) fall short.
But yeah, USB never came up with a good way to do peer-to-peer. On-the-go is super driver heavy and just not useful in the way RS232 is. New TVs still ship with it, for home automation reasons.
Man... USB CDC is painful. It's so much "fun" that a serious solution on one product was two back-to-back FTDI transceivers. I think they finally designed that out, but I'm scared to look at what might be in its place now....
presented without comment
They are genuinely useful.
I was pretty happy to throw it out the window in favor of USB. Of course, firewire was better than usb and the whole cycle started again.
USB CDC is worlds of pain more complicated to implement, but quite easy to use. As long as you don't hit a bug. But USB stacks never have bugs, do they?
Also, isochronous mode is great in theory, but in practice, at least in a desktop computer, the rest of the machine internals are not isochronous so you can still run into real-time delivery failures.
A rare case of successful naming, then.
Trivia: Pretty sure the 6-pin FireWire connector was inspired by the GameBoy link cable connector. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Link_Cable
RJ11 (eg landline) and RJ45 (eg ethernet) were also connectors that achieved very widespread use, as did RG6 (eg cable tv)
(I'm not going to say they changed the world and I'm also not so sure I like the grab-bag nature of the various things the article lists either
for example, 8, 14 and 16 (and more) pin DIP were pretty important, or was it the TTL signals they carried or was it the connecting solder that ultimately made USB valuable... dumb article to write as a listicle.
What you call DB-9 is actually DE-9. (A DB-9 would be the size of a DB-25 but with only 9 pins, which would be weird.)
What you call RJ11 is a 6p2c. (Six position, two connectors.)
What you call an RJ45 is an 8p8c. (You can guess this one.)
The letter in the D-subminiature line (aside: they really didn’t anticipate how small connectors were going to become) refers to the shell size (A through E, though not in size order). “DB” is frequently used colloquially as a prefix for any size in the line. There’s also some interesting variants like the DB13W3, which is a B-size shell containing 10 ordinary pins plus 3 coax connectors.
RJ11/RJ45 refer to the connectors and the way they’re wired, together. For example, RJ14 is the same 6p connector as RJ11 but wired to support two phone lines instead of just one, and the same 8p8c connector we’d use for Ethernet but wired for 4 phone lines would be an RJ61.
I went to the trouble to point out truly salient distinctions between physical/hardware layers, signal/electrical layers, and virtual/logic layers that were being ignored, and thoroughly pointing out technologies that were extremely important to changing the world thoroughly in the ways in which the article was discussing
And, here, you can buy yourself a DB9 https://www.l-com.com/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-a-d...
Secondly: a common mistake is still a mistake. That shop is selling things with DE-9 connectors, all of which they have mislabeled.
and nor did I say you did, who now is misreading?
why do you avoid replying to the the main thrust of my rebuttal?
again, I made a cogent argument about the main topic, and whether I labelled a old connector the way many others did is irrelevant to the topic at hand, and if anything hobbles your pedantry hobby horse. Where are your critiques of the more egregious errors in TFA?
> Because personal computers first used DB-25 connectors for their serial and parallel ports, when the PC serial port began to use 9-pin connectors, they were often labeled as DB-9 instead of DE-9 connectors, due to an ignorance of the fact that B represented a shell size. It is now common to see DE-9 connectors sold as DB-9 connectors
from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature
There are plenty of other sources available, which I’m not going to bother looking up.
As for the rest of your initial comment, I don’t disagree: you made a pretty substantive contribution to the thread, but again I never said you didn’t.
The main thrust of your “rebuttal” is trying to fight an argument I’m not making.
I mistakenly took your phrase "if you want to be pedantic" to mean that I was being pedantic, but inadequately so, a common just desserts.
now, if you want to be pedantic, which you seem to, you might wish to say that I did not mistake your phrase but in fact I chose the most common usage of that phrase as its clear meaning, and you could have been more clear simply by saying "not to be pedantic, but...", as my comment was clearly not focused on model numbers but on real issues of substance, and your comment was focused on pedantry.
The idea that APIs are a singular thing - or started as late as the article suggested - is also sufficiently wrong to put everything else written in the article into doubt.
Why not? [1]
API's existed long before this.
So something more in line with the rail car system is in order.