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

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

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.

	paul