Re: Help Constructing Fictional Cross-Religious Movement

On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 14:17:14 GMT, sharkey <sharkey@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> The "because one end is driven and the other end isn't" explanation
>> (for RS232, in part of Ric's reply) is an explanation, not an excuse.
>
>Ah, well, I've been away for a bit so I'm coming in after it's all
>over, but:
>
>For the answer to "Why didn't these cretins make the connector so that
>either end could be either end and the cable just connects TX to RX",
>see the "Yost Connector", a mapping from RS232 pinouts to RJ45 pins,
>which has that property. But, of course, never really took off.

Eh? Why "of course"? Because it would be too convenient?

>For the answer to the hermaphroditic connectors, see Token Ring, but
>only briefly. The answer is: Sure, you can, but it'll be expensive
>and it'll still suck.

What's Token Ring, a networking technology, got to do with serial
connections?

Round about when Token Ring was being invented, by some guys at
Camridge Uni, ethernet was just coming into fashion. Ethernet has
some disadvantages (packet collisions) but has enough advantages
that (with hindsight) it's obviously a better choice.

And the original coaxial ethernet (both thick and thin) had the
advantage that you *could* just connect cables together. The
mistake the guy who specified the connectors made, was that
they are too easy to disconnect. (And finding a break in a
large LAN was a pain.) The modern ethernets get around the
"break in the network" problem by, typically, going for a
star topology - but that's at the expense of extra hardware
(a central hub, or switch, or router). And you typically need
more cabling, too.

Jonathan

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