Dear Tim,
   
   You wrote:
> If you're local, lunch at McDonald's is good enough.
   
   I'm not local to you. But even if I were, I never go to McDonald's (or
any other junk food distribution outlet for that matter), so if I were to
pay you with a lunch at McDonald's, I would simply send you a check for its
cost, and I don't need to be local to you for that.
   
   But your prices are very reasonable. Much cheaper than DECdirect. If
when I squeeze as much as possible out of DEC field service I still have an
unmet need for console cables, I'll buy some from you.
   
> This cable *always* has a "twist" in it mapping 1<->6, 2<->5, 3<->4.
   
   That's how genuine DEC cables are mapped.
   
> That's the wonderful thing about the DEC MMJ scheme: there's no
> worrying about DTE vs DCE!
   
   That's the whole point of MMJ.
   
> I dinked
> around with other pinouts before standardizing on MMJ; it is
> just *the* obvious choice as I can take the end of a cable and
> plug it into an adapter anywhere and it simply works - no worrying
> about DCE vs DTE after I've bolted the RJ<->DB adapter onto the
> equipment!
   
   I would imagine that the DEC engineers have gone through exactly this
reasoning.
   
> Tack on US$3 shipping for USPS priority mail
> delivery of the resulting cable.
   
   If I'm ordering several cables, is the shipping charge applied only once
or for each cable?
   
> > Can you make a cable that looks _PROFESSIONAL_, i.e., no worse than a
> > genuine DEC one? That means no uninsulated conductors sticking out,
> > etc.
>
> Absolutely.
   
   Does this also apply to your RJ11-to-DB25 adapters? How do they look?
The genuine DEC ones seem to be impossible to make without a factory.
   
   Sincerely,
   Michael Sokolov
   Phone: 440-449-0299
   ARPA Internet SMTP mail: sokolov@alpha.ces.cwru.edu