On Wed, Jul 12, 2023 at 06:18:41PM -0400, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:
no one spoke of printer cables. Serial connectors are 9 pin, parallel cables are 25 pin. while old style printer cables use 25 pin as well, there is no, or not to my personal experience a 9 pin connector at all for those printer cables. as a side note allot of external speech synthesizer hardware used 25 pin connectors. and lpt port allocations as well.
Serial ports on PCs eventually tended to be 9 pin. Earlier on and on most other platforms they were 25 pin. Usually the serial and parallel ports used the opposite gender, but on some systems that was not the case. Even worse, some systems (Macintosh and Amiga for example) even used 25 pin ports for SCSI (with the same gender as the parallel port, sometimes places right next to each other. Mixing them up fried things). There were too many standards made by too many people. Many of them conflicting with each other. So the number of pins tells you nothing about what the port is unfortunately. Or at least not with much certainty. If the device has a serial interface, it connects to a serial port on the PC. If the device has a parallel interface it connects to a parallel port on the PC. The cable might adjust the connector, but it does not change the protocol, unless it is an active cable (like a USB to serial or USB to parallel cable for example). -- Len Sorensen