Oh yes. I think you’re right about Toslink!
Here’s my chart of audio connectors:
good neutral evil
lawful BNC XLR Switchcraft TA (aka "mini-XLR")
neutral Speakon banana Toslink
chaotic RCA 1/4" jack any cable with random connectors you find at the bottom of the box, also 2.5mm jack
I got in the habit of never actually engaging those thumbscrews for VGA and serial connectors. With parallel linkups the connector was heavy enough that it did stand a good chance of working loose if you didn’t, so I stayed in the habit there.
Don’t Eldritch entities usually subscribe to blue-and-orange morality incomprehensible to mortals?
What makes that one(along with a number of other low speed SCSI options) extra evil is that it could also be a parallel connector(the ‘centronics’ one one the printer end of things; never got a good account of why that side didn’t use the same connector as the PC side…)
Context often made it clear; but ‘can be two different things entirely’ is never a good look.
I’m no FireWire partisan; but, in practice, didn’t the answer usually end up being “4-pin: Sony and all DV cams; PC laptops if supported at all”, “6-pin: Apple, some PC desktops and workstations, most other peripherals”; and “8-pin: approximately one Mac pro; the broken dreams of fanboys”?
9 pin was on a variety of Apple laptops and desktops. Was standard on iMacs for years not just the MacPro.
Bummer. Theres been lots of times when I wanted to do markdown tables
Right, I never had a case in pro audio with mis-wired XLRs. I have unfortunately had to deal with poorly crimped BNC which left wiring exposed or half broken and have watched people try to yank out BNC connectors without twisting and even wrong impedance BNC cables.
I think my imac had firewire 800. Used it for one of my drives:
https://www.seagate.com/external-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/goflex-desk/
because USB2.0 was dog slow. The firewire 800 price premium was galling.
The nice thing about FireWire is the connectors and cables are forward and backward compatible. You could plug a FireWire 800 drive into a FireWire 400 port and things will work fine (you just obviously don’t get full FW 800 data rates).
(Come to think of it, SCSI was the same way, too.)
I probably have at least half a dozen mutually incompatible SCSI cables within ten feet of me. The protocol itself is pretty great, though.
I’ve always been able to get by with adapters but I’ve certainly never been exhaustive with every single combination. Backwards/forwards compatibility has always been pretty good in my experience.
Well, I don’t think you’re going to get U320 to work with the centronics connector, or mix high voltage differential SCSI with LVD on the same bus, but I guess you should be able to get any SE device to sort of work with appropriate adapters. I think the whole chain will generally drop to the speed of the slowest device, though.
That’s amazing. (Did it actually carry signal end-to-end?)
USB mass storage into PS/2 mouse into serial into parallel?
doubtful.
Yeah no clue. Not my picture 
I just remember having seen it in the past, seemed like a good opportunity to dig it up
Just starting at the bottom, we have a flash drive plugged into a USB to PS/2 adapter, so no. That kind of adapter doesn’t even work with all kinds of USB keyboards, let alone other USB device classes. They have to have implemented the PS/2 backwards compatibility mode that, as I recall, was added to the USB human-interface device protocol specifically so that people would be able to use the newer keyboards on old PCs with a cheap, passive adapter like that.
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