[ale] A little gripe

[J.D. Forinash]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 04:34:19PM -0400, J.D. Forinash wrote:

(Yes, I talk to myself all the time.)

> But serial, that's another story. For one, you can't just go buy a 
> serial cable. There's 25 pin and 9 pin and RJ45 and male and female.
> And then electrically they're different. One end's DTE and one end's DCE.
> And then add in the fact that there doesn't seem to be a standard that any 
> two companies use to put serial on RJ45. 
> And then add in the fact that most serial hardware doesn't care about half
> the signals.

...and then there's companies who can't even read specs and build 5v serial
devices. (argh!) 

...and then there's the fact that DCE and DTE are backward-- computers are 
no longer "data computing equipment", they're "data terminal equipment"...
(Hysterical reasons.)

...oh, and there's also that damned eight-pin DIN stuff the macs use for
serial. Let's not forget that. And while we're at it, the SGIs that use 
those, too... Thank god we don't see serial run on DB15 or DB23 anymore,
and that Sun finally decided to split two serial ports out onto two 
connectors.

And then there's multiple signal rates, all sorts of options for how many
data bits and/or parity bits and/or stop bits (though I _think_ the world's 
almost standardized on n-8-1... or is it e-7-1? Argh!) 

I'm not old enough to have to deal with this crap!

(Sorry. I read my last message and realized I wasn't quite done yet...)

-JDF	[The wonderful thing about standards, there's so many to choose from]
--
J.D. Forinash                           ,-.       
Georgia Tech College of Computing CNS  ( <  	  
211 CCB; (404)-385-0391                 `-'
The more you learn, the better your luck gets.                
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