Quote Originally Posted by Fivetide View Post
Well you have educated me boldford and thats not easy ..ask any of my teachers .. although I think they will all be dead by now lol :)
to continue your education and confuse you further... serial data cables (where the data is sent on 1 wire, 1 bit at a time) used to be 25pin D-types. Thats because you often had a primary and secondary (data and control) channel in the same cable. When IBM designed the PC they decided the serial port was only for modem communications and, since only 8 pins are needed for a single channel, used a 9-way Male D type to save costs. I have several 9-way to 25-way DTE-DCE cables from those good 'ol days. In their infinite wisdom they also decided to add a printer port, but again to save costs, opted not to use the Centronics parallel connector but a 25way D Female (to distingush it from a 'serial' 25 Dtype which is Male on an end device). Thus years of confusion and misery were born while people searched for the correct cable.... :)