What's that?

#1 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 10:19 68kMLA

Hi all,

In one of my last conquests, I got a box full of cables and adapters. Always useful! In that stuff I found half a dozen of those adapters:

Click for full size - Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

Click for full size - Uploaded with plasq's Skitch

The one in the top left is obviously a DB-15 - VGA adapter. At first I thought they were all the same, and then I noticed some of them had a DB-25 SCSI connector on one end and something else on the other. I have both females-males and males-females. Does anybody know what they are? Thanks!

#2 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 12:56 68kMLA

The bottom left one I think is a serial, not a SCSI. Some modems/devices have DB25 connectors on serial ports, and so that adapter converts it to a standard DE-9 serial port commonly found on PC's.

At least, that sounds about right.

#3 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 14:27 68kMLA

Thanks!

The bottom left one and the right one are the same, only reversed. Since the connector is DB-25 I assumed it was some kind of SCSI, I didn't know that other devices used the same connectors.

Serial, then. Well, too bad I don't know what to do with them! Is there anything useful to do, with a lot of old Macs and some Apple ][?

#4 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 16:38 68kMLA

You may find the serial adaptors useful for an old modem or something....It's always handy to have a few adaptors kicking around

#5 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 18:41 68kMLA

Absolutely!

#6 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 19:58 68kMLA

I believe the two bottom adapters are old PC parallel (not SCSI) to serial adapters. Top adapter is DB-15 to VGA as mentioned before.

#7 Sat, 21 Mar 2009 - 21:15 68kMLA

That.... Is a keyboard.

#8 Tue, 24 Mar 2009 - 01:22 68kMLA

You may find the serial adaptors useful for an old modem or something

Early on the the PC world many modems had db-25 as the serial connector.

I think IBM pc-xt's actually used some of the extra pins for some type of talk-back/ACK for synchronous modems.

While the db -25 cables and gender changers are usualy just pass through and can be used for either serial or parallel use. This adaptor will NOT convert serial to parallel.

Dig this for more info http://www.jspayne.com/io/schematics.html

JHV

#9 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 - 13:17 68kMLA

A parallel modem??? I don't think so...

Yeah I meant just as a wire adaptor - obviously it does nothing to the actual signal/protocol that passes thru it!