Posted on 09/21/2022 6:42:14 PM PDT by mabarker1
Found this at the thrift store today one end appears to be a 26 pin female from what I can count and is a pushsnap connector and the other end is a parallel 25 pin/DB25 male.
Pics below.
Thanks in advance.
That’s what I was thinking. But it doesn’t have the little angle thing on one side. Maybe it isn’t that after all.
You are correct. Wrong number of pins.
Oh well.
I should have looked more carefully.
db25 connectors are still very much in use in audio components:
https://www.sweetwater.com/c831--Snakes_XLR_to_DB25
https://www.sweetwater.com/c830--Snakes_DB25_to_DB25
That said, I think Bartholomew Roberts in his Post 53 called it as an old European standard VCR cable.
The solar uranus port.
Looks like a proprietary SCSI connector for a scanner or printer. Ran across quite a few in the late 80s and early 90s. Absolutely worthless then, even more so now.
Funny...a lot of us guys can be inveterate packrats with things like this! I have three whole cabinets full of network cables, old SCSI cable, all of it.
A few months back, I was looking around, and realized I had about 30 standard power cables. All neatly coiled up and tie wrapped, but not all in one place. It was if over the years, I would toss a few up there, and they procreated, making a bunch more.
So I said, damn, I don’t need all these, at most one, because in all the time I had them, I never once had to grab one, so I figured one was good, and threw out all the rest.
At some point, I used up that one cable, and promptly forgot about it. (This next part is related to this, even though it doesn’t sound like it is)
My best friend (who I joined the Navy with back in the Seventies under the “buddy system” where you go to Boot Camp together) called me and said he found some reel to reel tapes his father made back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, things like the Stanley Cup Finals when the Bruins played the St. Louis Blues, around those times.
His father apparently had a reel-to-reel tape deck similar to a Grundig unit my dad had back in the early Sixties, like a full-sized suitcase, where you open it up and it is a tape deck.
He would apparently set it up with the microphone in front of the tinny speaker the bulky tube television used, and record the television game, and maybe some sounds of the family in the background watching, but mostly the television.
Anyway, he said that he found the tape deck too sitting quietly in a corner of the attic for fifty years, and it had no power cable. Neither of us knew anyone who had a reel to reel anymore, so I told him it would it would be fun to make it run, so he brought it over. I looked really dilapidated without even opening it, but we felt the challenge. I looked at the receptacle on it for the power cable, and it was a bit odd, obviously a non-standard one as many may have been.
I got an Exacto Knife to began whittling with, and went to look for an expendable power cable.
One by one, I opened my three cabinets and began pawing around for one of those multitude of power cables I knew I had, and I was going to mangle one of them to get into the receptacle on the tape unit.
I got kind of excited, it was fun, the kind of things guys just like, trying to MacGyver something that is a lost cause and like Frankenstein, you somehow manage to make it work and come alive even though it has been buried in the equivalent of a cemetery, a hot cemetery of an attic for half a century.
Gotta get a cable, somehow make a cord that worked, and...try to turn it on. It became a challenge. I started to get a little crazy, because I knew I had dozens of those damned useless things, but now, I could not even find a single one!
You see, I simply forgot I threw them all out and then used up the last one I saved at some point. I am at the point In life that when it happens, you realize first hand that, crap, this old age memory thing sucks because you doubt yourself. But while I dug, it didn’t even occur that I had thrown them out, so I dug through those cabinets like a crazed miner trying to claw his way out of a collapsed tunnel. (I only remembered later that had thrown them all out. A few weeks later, that memory came back from some kind of mental vacation they had been on, and plopped back into my mind. I was probably chewing on a piece of London Broil or something when the memory said “We’re home! Remember us?”)
I had pulled out nearly every damn cable in those three double cabinets of mine. It occurred to me that like a geologist who views the change of the Earth over time by examining the sedimentary layers of some rock formation, I was doing the same thing in a way, because all the newest cables were near the front of the cabinets, and as I pulled them out to look behind, there were older cables there.
And the further back I groped in the cabinets, the further back in computer time I went. The cable began to dredge up memories for me.
That damned printer. Like the one the guys execute in that field in “Office Space”. I hated that POS printer.
Then they stopped evoking memories, and simply became obscure and mysterious.
What the hell is this? Cable is cream colored, and both ends are turquoise or something like that. Ahhh. This went to to a automated port switcher I purchased back in the mid-nineties. You could plug two things into one port, and the software would get the input, decide what device you were using of the two, and switch to be able to accept that signal. It was great when you only had one port and two devices.
Except it never worked right. It ALMOST worked. Which makes us crazy. And this was before the day of the Internet really taking over, downloading software updates and such. You had to call the company on the phone. They were in Hawaii. And they would mail you a floppy. Hahahahahahahha! So you would marinate for a few weeks, like a little kid waiting for that decoder ring to come in. Then it would come in and still wouldn’t work.
Each one I pulled out had some story associated with it, and I took a trip back in computer geological time!
I never did find a power cable. I got so desperate that I stole one off my printer and resolved to get one from someone else who had a bunch of them. I carved that cable up and, voila! I got it in!
With much anticipation (and a little nervousness, because it is a real crap shoot safety-wise) I turned on the power, and...the level meters on the front, like Frankenstein dimly opening his eyes, came alive with an anemic, weak yellowish light!
But I couldn’t get the thing to turn the reel spindle, so I resolved to open it up. Boy, it was so...Sixties inside. Big, globs of solder on things, and when I switched it on I saw the problem right away. The motor turned but...the belt wasn’t turning. It was no longer a belt, it had turned into a static, solid loop baking in that attic (or wherever it was for half a century). When I touched it, it just disintegrated. I figured I could rig something up, so I got a big broad rubber band, and...it was tight, but it worked.
I turned it on and it worked! I threaded up a tape, and turned it on...but no sound. I blew out the volume switches with air, then ended up removing them for a closer look, and they were worthless. The metal surfaces were so corroded that they weren’t just corroded, they were gone.
At that point I gave up, but it was fun. Providentially, I called a friend who just got a reel to reel from his deceased brother, and I drove right over to pick it up. I hooked it up, loaded up a tape, and digitized the sound into mp3 format. Those tapes were fun to listen to, the beer commercials and car commercials from 1970 really brought back memories!
In any case, many of us guys are packrats for that reason.
LOL, it is one of the fun things about FR. At least once a day, some Freeper makes a wonderfully pithy and memorable remark about something that lands square on my funny bone. It may not be the funniest thing, but in the context it just fits.
Yup
Begs the question, Why?
Dude, it’s time to get computers from this century!
I knew I'd seen that connector before.
“maybe a 3.5 in floppy drive”
I recently read an article about “the last place to buy a floppy disc”. Interesting article on how the guy worked for a large company and ended up with his own disc duplicating outfit and now takes in old floppys, refurbishes them and sells them.
Still a bunch of old systems out there that need them. I have older scientific equipment that uses the 3.5 inch floppies for data transfer. There are ways to hook them up directly to a computer but the floppies are easier.
I bought a big box of brand new ones years ago at the thrift store for cheap - probably 200 or so.
Blender. Far as I can tell.
Did I win?
That is one of the funnest things I have read in a long time my friend. So true, Thank you.
A must read for the wives... lol
May I have permission to repost over at our place and get a thread started?
“Each one I pulled out had some story associated with it, and I took a trip back in computer geological time!”
Been there! lol
Of course! My wife is semi-tolerant of my now diminished pack-rat tendencies...
We live in a small ranch, and long ago we both had to decide: Do we want a house full of junk, tchochki, widgets, to the point of looking like a hoarder’s house who has saved every newspaper, magazine, or plastic milk jug since the beginning of time (only keeping open narrow walkways through the house) or are we going to live in a house?
She made an unofficial rule that if I bring something home, I have to throw something out! It is an inside joke, but it cuts both ways.
When she goes to craft fairs or clothing stores, she is more likely to pick something up, walk around with it, then put it back down and walk away without bringing it home to put on a shelf.
When I encounter some tubular metal thing in front of someone’s house with a “Free” sign, the possible uses flash before my eyes, but I don’t turn my car around!
Hahaha...my dad was a major packrat, and I loved it. His last job after he retired from the Navy was the facilities manager of a bank branch, and vans and pickup trucks were always pulling into our driveway and dropping stuff off after things were ripped out of banks during renovations he was overseeing. He filled the garage, and my mom was pissed every time a bank truck pulled in-I wondered if she would go out in her robe and curlers and shout “You aren’t dropping that off here!”
At one point, we had an eight foot by five foot pane of glass that must have been an inch thick, and it was a source of interest for me. It was so damn heavy it seemed unnatural. And we had four safes, one nearly five feet tall, none of them with combinations! I recall two that couldn’t be opened, and two that couldn’t be closed.
But I loved it. Just...junk!
It plugs into plugs ass.
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