[lore] Port Spotting - A Guide To Recognising Obsolete Connectors in the UCC

[Davyd Madeley]

Recommend the addition of pictures, especially that of a vampire tap.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley

http://www.davyd.id.au/
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Port Spotting - A Guide To Recognising Obsolete Connectors in the UCC
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The UCC is full of crap. Old, obsolete crap that you certainly wouldn't find
on any respectable computer Dell sells. It begs the question though, where
did all come from? and why is it still in the UCC? This article presents
some of the gamut of connectors, buses and cables that inhabit the UCC.

Apple Desktop Bus (ADB)
-----------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Desktop_Bus

ADB used to be used on every Apple Macintosh to connect the
keyboard and mouse (and was still used internally in Powerbooks and iBooks
up till early 2005). The UCC still has a couple of old Macs that use ADB,
they're in the machine room, powering webcams. It also has a huge box of
ADB cables, because it turns out they're the same connector as S-Video.

Modified Modular Jack (MMJ)
---------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Modular_Jack

MMJ connectors look very similar to little RJ12 plugs nowadays used for your
phone, but they're not quite the same, the hook is on the side rather than
in the middle. MMJ was developed by DEC for connecting all of their serial
equipment together. Some of the DECservers and DECterminals in the UCC have
MMJ connectors on them.

13W3
----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13W3

13W3 plugs used to be common on high-end monitors, as appeared on the UCC's
Sun and SGI workstations. Their distinguishing feature is three miniature
coaxial connectors inside the plug for carrying the red, green and blue
signals. The other pins communicate sync and monitor information.

Attachment Unit Interface (AUI)
-------------------------------

At one time, when people still used a number of different physical mediums
for Ethernet, AUI was used as a generic connector to connect the network card
to the transceiver (or medium attachment unit) rather than having the medium
connected directly to the network card.
The UCC has many AUI<->10BaseT and 10Base2 transceivers, which are about the
size of a large matchbox, it also has one or two large "vampire taps" for
connecting 10Base5 thicknet cables.

Micro Channel Architecture (MCA)
--------------------------------

MCA was a computer bus invented by IBM in the 1980s. It was found in their
PS/2 and RS/6000 machines. The cards are huge, and can be readily identified
by the blue plastic positioning guides on their backs. The UCC seems to have
a disproportionally large number of MCA cards for the number of MCA-based
machines it is every likely to have owned.

SBus
----
>From 1989 up until 1997, SPARC-based computers (i.e. those built by Sun)
used a bus known as SBus. Unlike most expansion cards, SBus cards were
designed to be mounted parallel to the motherboard. You could fit three SBus
cards into the "pizza box" SPARCstation 1. SBus was 32-bit, so 64-bit SPARCs
(as became the norm) double clocked the bus to transfer 64-bits in every
cycle. The UCC machine Manbo contains a number of SBus cards.