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Mac Portable, Anyone know what this strange card is?

I would say parallel port card. For use with some mac/pc printer. The gender change cables are pretty abundant. You can still get them at radio shack in the drawers, I saw some the other day.

 
If that were the case, why wouldn't they use the correct gender in the first place? Male DB-25 is a serial port in the PC world, although most were DB-9 by the Mac Portable era. I'm guessing that was a custom interface for whatever peripheral it came with.

It would help greatly to see what's on the card.

 
well since all three that have passed through my hands were from business, I would shudder to guess like an engraver...... Its like a mystery game. I am just making fun, take no malice from my comment please.

On the serious note you have a point, why wouldn't they put the correct gender from the get go? That is a good point, but a lot of gear was odd back then. SCSI was weird like that also, male to female, gender changes, different pin outs, different modes and settings. It seems like IDE was like the automatic transmission in a car while scsi was a manual transmission.

 
IDE was a simple hard disk interface, little more than an extension to the AT bus. SCSI was a multi-purpose peripheral bus. It was designed right from the start to be much more than a hard drive interface.

 
The original IDE port on a PC motherboard is basically an ISA slot pinout in a different form factor. All an early ISA IDE "interface" consisted of were a few 74-series parts acting as address decoders for 0x170-17Fh and 0x370-137Fh address lines connected to a 40pin IDC socket.

As for the Portable, I recall seeing a unit on ebay a few months ago that had a video adapter in the PDS slot, but the output was a standard DA-15 Macintosh video port.

 
The design is oddly similar to the memory card in my Portable. No surprise considering it was made by the same company. I'm guessing its some sort of video card.

 
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