My favorite was the time we received a new batch of controllers from a vendor, same revision number, and their RX and TX pins were swapped. When working with RS232, it's best to have a handful of null adapters and gender changers in your pocket.
Laplink cables had DB-9 and DB-25 on both ends with the crossover built-in.
There were some male to male cables that had crossover while others didn’t. Then there were null modem adapter dongles for straight through cables. They were either male-female or male-male depending.
Reminds me about older Ethernet: before Auto-MDI/MDIX on most NICs and switches, crossover RJ-45 cables were needed.
Having both a null modem and a gender bender end-to-end was common.
These aren’t dead technologies by any stretch, not that you were implying that.
Real techs knew them as "gender changers" which was different enough to be recognizable as only a technical term for cable connectors.
I’ll bet you’re not a native English speaker. Nothing wrong with that, btw.
Seems pretty spot-on to me.
Sorry if you don't see the pejorative connotations in the other term. We avoided it because we didn't wish to offend people.
You remind me of one of the tech leads I have the occasional displeasure of interacting with. He'll blow in with some new work for us to do, and a stack of reasons to do it. The topmost in the stack he'll provide, and the rest of the stack he keeps hidden. The problem with his stack of reasons are twofold:
1) It takes no less than five and -typically- fifteen minutes to get through the stack.
2) Only the reason at the base of the stack is non-bogus. All of the others are calibrated to sound _great_ to folks who don't work on the thing (and talk to customers who use the thing) day in and day out.
Next time, start with the reason at the bottom of your stack when you're talking to technical folks like us. ;)