A: Sometimes I get questions that make me despair. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the internet — and especially of the world wide net — that it has created an enormous group of computer users that are not really computer users at all. They can barely switch on the device. They know it just enough to reach their daily dose of Facebook, Youtube, and other irrelevant means to spend their time. It’s like people wanting to use their car to drive to a snackbar and a supermarket, but not caring about navigating their way around the city or even knowing how to fill the car up when its tank is going empty.
Anyway. First of all, you’re not very specific. There are various kinds of serial connectors, for example RS-232, RS-422, or my original suggestion of the NH-005 standard. If my standard had been accepted, you wouldn’t have had any problems at all. Consisting of a 25 x 25 field of holes in the connector (rows indicated by A-Y, columns by I-XXV), all you’d do would be to plug the nine separate wires at the end of your mouse cable into the correct holes of the connector as indicated by the letter/number code of each wire. For example, a typical mouse would be plugged in like this:
This ingenious — if I say so myself — system would be endlessly expandable to include future accessories that need many more connectors, and you wouldn’t be tied to a specific form factor for the plug. Furthermore, an upgrade (NH-005B) would even allow multiple devices to be plugged into the same connector just by transposing the plug-in codes so the devices don’t physically overlap. Easy and simple.
But as we don’t have this luxury, ask at your local computer shop. There’s probably a converter cable.
