almost all the time, cables of this sort are straight through, pin for 
pin. thus, as long as the connectors match up, and the cable and 
connectors are of even vaguely the right impedance, things generally work
(at least on most DEC gear, which is reassuringly robust against such 
things as weird cabling.. sun gear, on the other hand, requires magic 
even when the cables are _perfect_ :) Given that youre talking about 5 
mhz scsi, the cable you describe sounds like a winner to me

isildur

On Mon, 12 May 2003 Robertdkeys@aol.com wrote:

> I am attempting to add a second scsi controller to my old
> qbus VAX 40000 200 crate.  I need to cobble up a cable
> from a 50 pin male card header to something scsi.  I would
> prefer hd50 rather than old centronics 50 plugs, if possible.
> Whilst perusing the depths of my odd box of DECish cable
> bits, I ran across a cable with two hd50 ends and a 50 pin
> dip header in the middle, constructed of individual wires,
> a' la DEC.  This would be the ideal cable to run from the
> qbus card up through the drive bay to the external cable
> connection point, provided it has the proper pinouts, and I
> clip off one of the hd50 sides to keep rf mismatches down
> to minimum.
> 
> Anyone, offhand have any info on this particular DEC cable,
> and if it is actually scsi?  If it is scsi pinouts, that would save
> me a trip to the cable monger's shoppe to beg them to make
> one up.....(:+}}...
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Bob Keys
>