Connectors Quiz!

Twaggies presents another quiz, which this time will have you in knots of frustration behind the media center.

• [Digilante]

  Come on, give us a real challenge ;-)

• [Rob Kendrick]

  The correct answer is not offered on several of the questions, so I selected the least wrong ones.  And got 100%, even though I’ve never heard of that spade connector thingy.

• [betatron]

  i missed one.   turning in my card…

  • [Bryan “bytehead” Price]

     Yeah, I missed one as well.

• [phisrow]

  Oh, they really turned up the easy mode on this one.

  I absolutely knew that I was out of the woods when the correct answer was “SCSI connector”, rather than “Which http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_connector? May god have mercy on your doomed soul…”

  • [bibulb]

    Oh, man, good times. “I’ve got a Jaz, a Zip and an external CD-ROM, and they’re all SCSI, and they all have different ports.”

    (Bonus fun : “Which one(s) need a terminator and where, and what order do they need to go in?”)

    There are some things I miss about the old Macs. SCSI voodoo is not one of them. 

• [webmonkees]

  “Ethernet connector” should be labelled ‘RJ45 connector” (It’s used for more than Ethernet)
   (bonus question should have been ‘straight-thru or crossover?’)

  VGA connector might be known as a SVGA connector (wrong # of pins) Although I will admit VGA connectors don’t show up much in the field, but that’s a topic for legacy nitpickers.

  • [Eric Garner]

    RJ-45 isn’t exactly right either. That’s an 8P8C connector. True RJ-45 connectors are keyed.

• [Maverick]

  I’m nitpicking, but the RCA connector is also coaxial.

• [bibulb]

  Their testing methodology leaves a bit to be desired – as someone else noted, they have some examples named by their use and others named by their connector type. Also, if you’re going to ask us to identify a type of connector, don’t show it to us in such a way as to occlude part of the connector. The PS/2 example where I couldn’t see half the pins made that one a little harder.

• [Quibbler]

  Number 4 is a phono and number 6 is a centronics.

• [Robert Cruickshank]

  Yes, don’t confuse connector styles with the signals carried on them.  For instance there’s no such thing as an “RS232 connector”- while it’s common to see it on a DE9, there’s actually no connector specified in the spec.

• [Chris Hudson]

  I totally shouldn’t got 100% and been proud of it, right?

• [nixiebunny]

  I was hoping that there would be some obscure connectors. The USB 3 was the closest thing to obscure, as it’s brand-new. And to the person who called the SCSI connector a Centronics connector, the number of pins is important. SCSI is 50, Centronics is 36. They’re actually Amphenol ribbon connectors, dating from the 1960s and first used in telephone systems.  A larger version was used in the back of Tektronix oscilloscope plug-ins in the 1950s.

  I could go on, but I won’t.

  • [Daniel Hull]

    Actually both the 36-pin and the 50-pin are “Centronics” connectors. The key factor is the plastic bar in the center of the connector body that holds the contact pins, regardless of how many there are.

    • [Eric Rucker]

      Nope.

      Micro ribbon.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centronics_connector

      Centronics is only correct for a 36-pin connector being used for the Centronics parallel standard, or a derived (IEEE 1284) standard.

• [.]

  Yeah, I was expecting something challenging. I suppose we could use it a work to weed out the dimmest of job candidates.

• [Henry Goodwin]

  I only got the spade connector correct because I have one as a necklace.

• [Just Thalia]

  Umm, yeah that was way too eassssy. 100% here yo!

• [Robert Cruickshank]

  If there was some kind of quiz that would keep people from jamming 3.5mm phone plugs into the holes in RCA connectors, I would support that. 

• [Shawn D’Alimonte]

  RJ-45 also implies a certain type of phone circuit is connected to the connector.

  Also I was annoyed that the F connector was just called “Coaxial RF connector”.  Do they not realize just how many RF connectors there are?

• [lecti]

  Too easy!