DB25 #5 — tighten your belt

Sometimes it’s important to make a dramatic 8 percent cut. Just to put it out there even you know it’s going to cost you more in the end. You were the guy who finally did what needed to be done, or anyway had some young tech people make the cuts for you.

I’m speaking, of course, about the DB-23 ecosystem of the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga is no more except as a series of icons distributed among the faithful. The DB-23 never did exist, or at least not by that name. D stands for subminiature, check, and B is a particular size of subminiature shell. 23 is the number of connectors. If you took a DB connector shell and put only 23 pins in it, that’s fine. You could call that a DB-23. If you did a shrinkflation and used a slightly smaller connector then that’s not a DB anything. Maybe it’s a Db or a Dß. In Amiga that was, the 23-pin less-than-B connector was just the monitor connector if it was the pin side and the external floppy connector if it was the socket side. It would almost certainly be bad to use a cable to connect one of those to the other.

With the decline of the Amiga and without any other user of that connector, supplies dried up. These connectors economical to make a hundred thousand at a time, much less so a hundred at a time. What were the remaining Amiga people to do? The long term answer turns out to be something like eBay — create a platform where it’s economical to reach the many thousands of such remaining connectors in small quantities wherever they remain. The short term answer for many hackers was to hack with a hacksaw or otherwise mechanically deform a DB25 into the necessary connector.

I don’t know how much extra it cost Commodore to save money on these smaller connectors, but it’s a cost that users still pay. The lead image for this installment comes from Gotek, a vendor of retro-computing accessories.

Anyway, dear readers, I hope you’re all managing and that if you’re ripping pins out of plugs and using archaic computers that it’s entirely by your choice and not to chase an imagined efficiency.