[Discuss] OT: what is this cable for?

[Ricker, William]

>  Ribbon cable w/ two (the name escapes me ..) "ring things" to usually used to fight inductance.. 

Snap-on Ferrite donuts actually *add* inductance, which rounds the corners of square wave digital signals, to prevent interference (both by and to) and/or induced spikes from lightning EMP. They come in a variety of specs which attenuate into progressively lower frequencies. Use the wrong one and you'll attenuate the desired signal too ! 

(One more pedantic than I might object that fighting interference is fighting *mutual* inductance, but that's not a measurable inductance outside of cross-talk range.)

Yes the DA-15 was used as Game/MIDI port on early IBM PC ISA sound cards. But the normal MIDI adapter cable would have been DA-15 to pair DIN-5 (or XLR3). Since the game port was re-used to drive all sorts of things, that's a possible origin, as are any custom frobistats. The C-50 / CN-50 was abused as an easy expansion interface for lots of pre-miniaturization devices -- it was originally a family or range of telco analog connectors for twisted pair snakes, eg multi-line phones & PBX to punchblock cabling, that was adopted for printers, re-adopted for SCSI-1, because it was available relatively cheap due to volume of telco use. As the RJ series has been adopted more recently. The C-36 had obscure computer uses, not sure if larger sizes were ever digitally 'appropriated'.

Bill @ $DayJob