Computer people, what is this thing?

serial port hub?

Looks like a method of connecting many devices to one PC's parallel port. There's probably a swith to select witch of the 8 connectors to use.

bang bus

parallel, serial, it's all physics

Maybe for connecting one printer to many PCs, from back when printers were expensive.

Maybe for connecting one printer to many PCs, from back when printers were expensive.

-- nickn, Wednesday, November 28, 2007 8:33 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

I think so -- we had this in the lab in middle school

That was my guess nickn...

No switches on it.

So, ah, does anyone want it? Should I put it on ebay for 99c? If so, what should I describe it as? Perhaps just let it have some quality time with sweet lady rubbish bin?

You might try ebay, but I think it's time has passed. Maybe call it an 8-in, 1-out Centronics connector (I think that's the name of that parallel connector).

halloween material

don't throw it out, it must be burned.

Is it from Doctor Who?

those aren't serial or parallel, they look like they're 68-pin SCSI connections.

which would make that thing a fucking bottleneck.

The sockets are 25 pin (parallel?), but the plug has 78 pins I think...

I guess I'm leaning toward tombot and wanko's suggestions. I looks like it might be good for using in some sort of Ghostbusters themed costume.

http://www.chaser.co.uk/

yea the big connector = something else....

my guess = parallel port multiplexer to let one machine connect to a bunch of devices through a special pci/isa card... seen em for modems (serial) before....

It's not SCSI. You'll need something like this to use it:

http://www.digi.com/products/serialcards/classicboard.jsp

It's basically worthless as it stands, and even if you had a card, it's not worth much more.

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/874/imageuploadimagema9.jpg

looks like maybe 50 pin SCSI narrow, state of the art in 1992.

Well, that was a wild ride, thanks everyone.

state of the art in 1992.

Hardly surprising, we're still on SCO unix here and using a dot matrix printer.

Now to get rid of all these IBM electric typewriter ribbons.

it's a time machine

Hardly surprising, we're still on SCO unix here

in a previous life i had to learn how to worm my way around sco unix because of one pain in the ass customer. HATED it, i seem to remember there were both size limits on partitions and the number of partitions we could use. fucking nightmare client, thought that by buying some storage he was getting a dedicated sysadmin too.

Multiple serial ports, hanging off a special card, for terminal connections. You ALWAYS saw these on SCO boxes (among other places).

This was how you connected many text terminals to a PC pretending to be a minicomputer, before everyone switched over to ethernet terminal servers.

We had BOXES UPON BOXES of this shit daisy chained at this placed I worked in Bristol RI in 2003. Funny enough they were running Red Hat and migrated from SCO unix.

Post software engineering nightmares!

I just found out that there is a terminal server board for a modular ethernet switch I have... but they're rare and expensive on the used market. I wish that was a more common option.