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RS232 is the electrical signal standard; the chunky connector usually used is a DB25 but basic RS232 can fit in DB9

RJ11 (eg landline) and RJ45 (eg ethernet) were also connectors that achieved very widespread use, as did RG6 (eg cable tv)

(I'm not going to say they changed the world and I'm also not so sure I like the grab-bag nature of the various things the article lists either

for example, 8, 14 and 16 (and more) pin DIP were pretty important, or was it the TTL signals they carried or was it the connecting solder that ultimately made USB valuable... dumb article to write as a listicle.



If you are interested in being a pedant, which you may or may not be:

What you call DB-9 is actually DE-9. (A DB-9 would be the size of a DB-25 but with only 9 pins, which would be weird.)

What you call RJ11 is a 6p2c. (Six position, two connectors.)

What you call an RJ45 is an 8p8c. (You can guess this one.)


To expand on the pedanticness:

The letter in the D-subminiature line (aside: they really didn’t anticipate how small connectors were going to become) refers to the shell size (A through E, though not in size order). “DB” is frequently used colloquially as a prefix for any size in the line. There’s also some interesting variants like the DB13W3, which is a B-size shell containing 10 ordinary pins plus 3 coax connectors.

RJ11/RJ45 refer to the connectors and the way they’re wired, together. For example, RJ14 is the same 6p connector as RJ11 but wired to support two phone lines instead of just one, and the same 8p8c connector we’d use for Ethernet but wired for 4 phone lines would be an RJ61.


I fully expect another pedant to respond to this, any minute now.



I was absolutely not being a pedant, because even though I was replying to a comment, everything I pointed out would have fit into the original article; whereas what you wrote fits only into my comment.

I went to the trouble to point out truly salient distinctions between physical/hardware layers, signal/electrical layers, and virtual/logic layers that were being ignored, and thoroughly pointing out technologies that were extremely important to changing the world thoroughly in the ways in which the article was discussing

And, here, you can buy yourself a DB9 https://www.l-com.com/frequently-asked-questions/what-is-a-d...


Firstly, I think you’ve misread: I didn’t accuse you of being a pedant, I suggested you might like to be. Behind a pedant on the internet is sometimes quite fun, but if you don’t want to, then don’t.

Secondly: a common mistake is still a mistake. That shop is selling things with DE-9 connectors, all of which they have mislabeled.


> misread: I didn’t accuse you of being a pedant

and nor did I say you did, who now is misreading?

why do you avoid replying to the the main thrust of my rebuttal?

again, I made a cogent argument about the main topic, and whether I labelled a old connector the way many others did is irrelevant to the topic at hand, and if anything hobbles your pedantry hobby horse. Where are your critiques of the more egregious errors in TFA?


You didn’t rebut a thing I said: the only substance of my initial comment was that you had mis-named some connectors... which you did. Your reply contained no proof otherwise, except the shop link which I explicitly addressed. If you’re really asserting that I’m wrong about connector names, here you go:

> Because personal computers first used DB-25 connectors for their serial and parallel ports, when the PC serial port began to use 9-pin connectors, they were often labeled as DB-9 instead of DE-9 connectors, due to an ignorance of the fact that B represented a shell size. It is now common to see DE-9 connectors sold as DB-9 connectors

from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature

There are plenty of other sources available, which I’m not going to bother looking up.

As for the rest of your initial comment, I don’t disagree: you made a pretty substantive contribution to the thread, but again I never said you didn’t.

The main thrust of your “rebuttal” is trying to fight an argument I’m not making.


thank you for directing my attention to the mistake.

I mistakenly took your phrase "if you want to be pedantic" to mean that I was being pedantic, but inadequately so, a common just desserts.

now, if you want to be pedantic, which you seem to, you might wish to say that I did not mistake your phrase but in fact I chose the most common usage of that phrase as its clear meaning, and you could have been more clear simply by saying "not to be pedantic, but...", as my comment was clearly not focused on model numbers but on real issues of substance, and your comment was focused on pedantry.




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