[HECnet] Anyone got spare MMJ-MMJ console cables?

[Cory Smelosky]

On 21 Dec 2012, at 18:14, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2012-12-21 21:48, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Dec 21, 2012, at 3:17 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2012-12-21 21:01, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Dec 21, 2012, at 2:52 PM, Clem Cole wrote:

...
The whole thing is sad/silly for both Lego and DEC - RJxx was/is a fine standard.
Why did they have to mess with it?   (Don't answer that I know - why but
it was things like that that contributed to DEC's undoing IMHO).

My former boss liked to refer to Ken Olsen as the "chief connector architect".   KO was really good at interfering at the wrong time for the wrong reason.

The first DECserver-100 was a fairly small box (about the size of two laptops sitting on top of each other), with some sort of connector I don't remember for the terminal ports.   Not a typical one -- I think it was some sort of 8-pin connector.

When the product was ready to ship, Ken looked at it and decided it needed to be redesigned.   It needed to go into a larger box, and it had to use connectors that look like phone connectors but were modified to be incompatible with anything ever seen before.   And so it was done.   I have seen a prototype of the result: the earlier box minus the top cover, sitting inside of the final DECserver-100 box, with jumper cables going between the original connectors and the MMJ connectors.

Sigh.   Among the gross management blunders of KO, this is undoubtedly a fairly small one, but it's illustrative.

Yeah. The DECserver 100/200/300 are truly things of air. There is a single board in them, and so much space it's ridiculous. However, the DS100 have DB25 connectors. The DS200 came in two variants. Either DB25 or MMJ, while the DS300 is MMJ only.

But they are a bit larger that two laptops, I'd say (looking at my DS300 right next to me right now). Might you be thinking of something else?

Maybe I have the model numbers wrong.   I was talking about the first DECserver.

Yes, the ones customers saw are bigger than a laptop -- they are rack-mount boxes, 2U or so.   The laptop-sized device I mentioned is one that didn't ship because KO insisted on having its box size and connector type redesigned.   So you never saw that one outside of DEC.

http://rainwillow.com/media/2011/data-pbx/DECServer200.png shows the DS200 with DB25 connectors. The DS100 looks the same. Rackmount sized, 2U sounds about right.

But if KO changed the connectors it can't have been the DS100. I thought the DS100 might have been the first one, but then again, I also remember something like the DS550, which was based on a PDP-11 and which was modular, with a qbus.. (I might remember the designation wrong.) They were before I think, but the design and concept was a bit different than the DS100.

Hmmmmmm. Would one accept random qbus expansion cards? ;)


	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol