The D-sub connectors were pretty intuitive, as far as I can remember. The 9-pin joystick ports never caused much trouble.
Making the USB connectors symmetric in their outer shape but not symmetrically pluggable was really inexcusable. When it came out I remember thinking that it was worse than any of the existing connectors. And this is supposed to be the new “universal” connector?
> The D-sub connectors were pretty intuitive, as far as I can remember.
I never personally had a problem with them, but I can attest that people did. At my first job (a small computer shop), we had multiple customers who tried to jam their D-sub connector on wrong, and broke one or more pins off. Since this was back in the day when the cable was hard wired into the monitor, that generally meant they had to buy a new monitor.
That is malicious, you cut off the d-sub connector and put another one on. I have never heard of someone replacing a monitor because the pins on the connector were damaged.
I've never heard of anyone replacing their hard wired monitor cable. And in any case I certainly wouldn't have had the skills, so I think "malicious" is an uncalled-for term here. Maybe my boss (the owner) knew better and chose to charge people for new monitors, but I definitely didn't.
As a repair shop, it is your job to repair the broken thing, not just sell them a new one. A big shielded molded cable can be fixed, either at the connector or replacing the whole cable where it terminates into the PCB. If I had known about a shop disposing of 500-700$ monitors with bad cables, I would have made a fortune.
As I have said, I had no idea you could fix such a thing. Hell I didn't even know that until this very thread, much less 20 years ago. As such it was not in the least malicious (ignorant perhaps, but that's a separate thing).
In any case, your unfounded criticism of my moral character is really irrelevant to the main point I made: it was totally possible to fuck up plugging in D-sub connectors, and I witnessed multiple people who had done so.
I apologize, my comment was too strong. I am sure many shops did this, probably because they got into retail when the home computer market was booming and weren't yet skilled in repair.
I wired a plug for the first time in my life this past year. Nor have I ever known someone who has wired a plug. It's pretty rare to have to do something like that, in my experience. Certainly at 18 I wouldn't have had any reason to believe that was even possible.
Sure, obviously different people will have different experiences. That's why I was careful to qualify it by saying "in my experience". But we never did that at home (though oddly enough my dad did plenty of other electrical work around the farm), and it definitely wasn't something I got taught in school. Until this year when I replaced my dishwasher, I had no idea one could even replace a power plug or that some things required you to wire a power plug into them.
Wow, that is almost impressive. Especially since you will find power plugs hanging next to the light bulbs in almost any grocery store in the world. But I guess, one need to know, to see them. Maybe we shouldn't think the users of our software are totally hopeless when they don't find all the functions we put in the menus.
Heh, as a former EE masquerading as a software developer, I would elicit gasps by...taking the case off a computer (do it while it's turned on and jaws hit the floor).
I did this once, it's not trivial. If you don't impedance match correctly, the colors get all wonky. It's a fairly specialized skill and more challenging than your typical solder job. Honestly easier to take the monitor apart and solder on a whole new cable.
Making the USB connectors symmetric in their outer shape but not symmetrically pluggable was really inexcusable. When it came out I remember thinking that it was worse than any of the existing connectors. And this is supposed to be the new “universal” connector?