Conversation

foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
It's good to see that international shipping is still confusing "fragile, handle with care" and "please hand to a rabid dog and convince them it contains tasty snacks"
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Replying to
@Foone
The V3 has some issues which mean you need a special connector (to correct a mis-wiring) and it won't work on B+ model raspis, but it's cheaper and I'm just going to use it for hackery reasons.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
So it's a simple board. Three chips, some diodes and resistors, a switch and some LEDs, and a centronics connector.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
The main chip is a TI SN74HCT573. That's an octal transparent D-type latch with 3-state outputs, accepting 4.5-5.5v. (The PC parallel port is 5v)
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
or as this datasheet from 1982 (last modified February of this year) calls it, a flip-flip.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
but because of the miswiring, it comes with this. The world's shortest, silliest, centronics extension cable.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
It's just a male to female adapter. which, as a trans person, I appreciate, but in cable terms this is just a very tiny extension. (or it would be if it was wired straight through, which it isn't)
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
It's actually an Amphenol connector. It just got called the "Centronics connector" or "Centronics port" after the Centronics Data Computer Corporation, who produced printers, making some of the first dot-matrix printers.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
They actually started as division of Wang Laboratories. So the connector, known as Centronics, was developed and made by Amphenol, and got famous because of a Wang spin-off.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
so it could easily have been called the Wang Connector or the Amphenol Connector, but in reality it's known technically as the IEEE 1284 connector, from when it got standardized out of what Centronics was doing.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Fun fact: You know how Brother makes a lot of printers? well, back in the 70s, they didn't. they made sewing machines and typerwriters.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
but they got into printers because Centronics needed help developing the printer mechanisms, and Brother was already world-class at that kind of tiny reliable machinery.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
and also because the CEO and founder of Brother International (the US arm of Brother Industries, a japanese company), Max Hugel, was the NEIGHBOUR of Robert Howard, the president of Centronics.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
so Brother makes printers today because Wang spun off a printer division and the president of their printer division happened to live next to the president of Brother USA. weird.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
ANYWAY Centronics was merged in with CPI (part of Control Data Corporation) in 1982, Control Data ran it until '86, then Drexel Burnham Lambert bought the CDC part, which got bought back by Centronics in '87. The same year, the printer business was sold to Genicom.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Genicom went bankrupt in 2003, selling off different parts of their printer business to different companies. The airline-printer (because that's a thing) was sold to IER.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
fun fact: the money Centronics made from selling their printer division was used to purchase Ekco Housewares, a company that had been around since 1888, making pots, pans, and silverware, becoming the biggest non-electric housewares manufacturer in the US by the 60s.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Centronics then renamed themselves Ekco Group, and continued making housewares until 1999, when they were purchased by Corning Consumer Products Co.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
SO. The "centronics" connector was made by Amphenol, got called Centronics by a spin-off of Wang, who made printers for 18 years before switching businesses into housewares, and technically still do that to this day, despite a couple mergers.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Final Fun Fact and then I promise I'll shut up: The Centronics connector made by Amphenol is unrelated to the AMP connectors used in PCs. AMP and Amphenol are unrelated, AMP isn't just an abbreviation for Amphenol.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
You probably don't know the AMP connectors in PCs, because they are universally called Molex.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
Molex is a completely separate company, and is unrelated to AMP or Amphenol. Also, AMP is no longer called AMP.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
They were originally called that because they were Aircraft and Marine Products, but they got acquired by Tyco International in 1999, and then after Tyco split into three companies in 2007, AMP's connector-making divisions ended up as part of Tyco Electronics
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
I lied, one final fun fact: This Tyco is unrelated to the Tyco Toys that produced Tyco Super Blocks, a Lego-clone in the mid-80s. (and I still have some of these!) Lego sued them over that, but lost. That Tyco was acquired by Mattel in 1997.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
That Tyco is also the one that made the US-1 Trucks in the 80s, a series of remote control slot car sets.
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foone🏳️‍⚧️
@Foone
and that's the same US.1 that got made into a series of comic books from Marvel in 1983, about Ulysses Solomon Archer, a cyborg trucker who can control his truck with his mind, fighting blimp-nazis and aliens and his evil brother.
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