🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, today I uncrate one of the two shiny new SparcStation 10's
that arrived 2 weeks ago, and in the process of setting things up
I discover that the system unit has twisted pair and AUI connectors,
but not thinwire (and guess which is the most common around here
-- that's right).  To make things even more interesting, Sun didn't
make the AUI connector standard; it's a tiny little connector that
looks like half of a SCSI port.  It has lots of little contact
pins, and is used as both an audio output port and an AUI port.

Naturally, Sun wants to charge an arm and a leg for the cable that
turns this bizarre port into something useful, and I'm even less
thrilled about having to plug an MAU into that cable (and the MAU
probably won't mate with the DB15 plug at the end of the Sun adapter,
so I'll have to buy a short length of AUI cable to connect it).
So what we end up with is an adapter plugged into an adaptor plugged
into an adaptor -- YUCK!

Or, alternatively, we could plug a twisted pair to thinwire adapter
into the twisted pair port, but one of those costs around $375,
which is about $175 than the previous option.

Please, someone tell me there's a better way of doing this.

(I will refrain from commenting once again how Sun seems to have
gotten a bad case of IBM-itis and is now gleefully engaging in
nickling-and-diming their customers to death by manufacturing
systems that require expensive little 'extras' to make them do
things that most other vendor's systems can do right out of the
box.  Oops, I just did.)

-- 
David Barts  N5JRN                      UW Civil Engineering, FX-10
davidb@ce.washington.edu                Seattle, WA  98195