joel@gould9.UUCP (Joel West) (04/21/86)
Quoting from MacTutor April 1986, which in turn is printing a report off the "Mousehole" BBS in Orange, CA: Hosiden Electronics in Japan got an order from Apple for 100,000 circle-8 connectors (which we call Din plugs). Nobody makes them anymore, including Hosiden. March 1st they had sent Apple 4,000 connectors to date. February 20th, Apple has increased their order from 100,000 to 1,000,000. Exactly 10-fold. I think this might be half the reason the upgrades are so slow in coming out. Hosiden doesn't care much for them because they are not making much money on them as compared to the color LCD flat screens they are making for commercial airliners as TV's. I understand the technical reasons for going to the mini connectors, but I've always felt Apple made a big mistake after 2 years of trying to get people to accept the DB-9 (or whatever its official name is). At least you can buy the DB-9's at Radio Shack (in fact, all but 2 of my DB-9 cables consist of Joystick Extension Cords with one end cut off and a connector soldered on.) -- Joel West (619) 457-9681 CACI, Inc. Federal, 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct., La Jolla, CA 92037 {cbosgd, ihnp4, sdcsvax, ucla-cs} !gould9!joel {seismo!s3sun, hplabs!hp-sdd, sun!pyramid} !gould9!joel joel%gould9.uucp@NOSC.ARPA