On 2012-12-21 21:01, Paul_Koning at
Dell.com wrote:
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.
Yeah. The DECserver 100/200/300 are truly things of air. There is a single board in them,
and so much space it's ridiculous. However, the DS100 have DB25 connectors. The DS200
came in two variants. Either DB25 or MMJ, while the DS300 is MMJ only.
But they are a bit larger that two laptops, I'd say (looking at my DS300 right next to
me right now). Might you be thinking of something else?
Johnny
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