What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2063

pechter-at-gmail-dot-com (Bill Pechter) writes:

And that's DE-9, not DB-9, right? Nobody knows what the second letter stands for anymore, either.

I feel your pain - I do a lot of RS-232 work with telcos too. I never had to go as far as in your story, but I did spend three days on the phone trying to diagnose a failing interface to a property management system. The customer insisted it was OK because the PMS kept receiving data from us. Specifically, the same record, over and over - because although the transmit line was wired correctly, the receive line was connected to ground at some intermediate patch panel. This meant we never received the ACKs we were waiting for, so we'd retransmit the record once a minute - and since the cable was "obviously" OK, all of that duplicate billing was just as "obviously" our fault.

They know which buttons to click on the latest fancy Windoze screens.

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