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https://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/06/04/db-19-resurrecting-an-obsolete-connector/
This is a happy story about the power of global communication and manufacturing resources in today's world. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, then you've certainly heard me whine and moan about how impossible it is to find the obscure DB-19 disk connector used on vintage Macintosh and Apple II computers (and some NeXT and Atari computers too). Nobody has made these connectors for decades.
I've got a disk emulator product called Floppy Emu that attaches to an Apple DB-19 port, so I need a steady supply of these connectors to build my hardware, and that's a problem. Over the past couple of years, I've scrounged what seems like every warehouse and basement on the planet, and bought up nearly the entire world's remaining supply of new-old-stock DB-19 connectors. My last few product batches included DB-19s from some very obscure international sources. It was clear I'd reached the end of the road.
This wasn't a surprise. The DB-19 shortage first became obvious to me about a year and a half ago, when a manufacturing error forced me to replace all the DB-19 connectors in a batch of boards, and replacements couldn't be readily found. Since then I've written a dozen times about the impending DB-19 doomsday. I also made severalattempts to design a DB-19 substitute using a small PCB and suitably-arranged header pins, but while they more-or-less worked, I wasn't satisfied with the result.
[...] But just as I was getting discouraged, good luck arrived in the form of several other people who were also interested in DB-19 connectors! The NeXT and Atari communities were also suffering from a DB-19 shortage, as well as others in the vintage Apple community, and at least one electronics parts supplier too. After more than a year of struggling to make manufacturing work economically, I was able to arrange a "group buy" in less than a week. Now let's do this thing!
[...] Two months passed, and a round of prototyping. Progress was slow but steady, and I received updates from the manufacturer every few days. I kept waiting, eagerly anticipating this DB-19 bounty. At the end of May the product finally shipped, only to disappear into a US Customs black hole somewhere for a couple of days. Then at long last, after what felt like an infinite wait, I came home to find 10000 of these beauties stacked on my doorstep[!]
(Score: 2) by knarf on Wednesday October 23 2019, @02:50PM (6 children)
Subject says it all, just take a hacksaw to a common-and-garden variety DB-25 and voilà, a DB-19. It isn't called a *hack*saw for nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @03:04PM (1 child)
Maybe try a search engine. Google came back with plenty available
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Wednesday October 23 2019, @04:10PM
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday October 23 2019, @03:57PM (1 child)
Awesome idea. Maybe not as rugged, nor would you want to sell them to the public that way, but maybe the shell could be rejoined... some are solderable, so you could solder a little copper strap linkage.
I'm embarrassed- having soldered probably hundreds of DB connectors in my life, but I've never heard of a DB-19 before this.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 23 2019, @08:08PM
I did it like that, i cut a DB-25 (or whatever the actual name is) and i cut the shell so, that it had extra to wrap around the plastic part and i soldered the shell together. Doesn't look like straight out of a factory, but it's still ok.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday October 24 2019, @08:29AM (1 child)
This is what some people used to do to make replacement monitor cables for the Amiga, which used a hard to find DB-23 connector, instead of the more common DB-25. I've no idea why they didn't just use DB-25 connectors, with two pins left unconnected. (Ditto for the author of the article, with even more unconnected pins, given that he was considering designing a DB-19 replacement.)
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday October 24 2019, @01:54PM
I assume it was for keying, as different sizes more effectively discourage the end user from breaking something by plugging a monitor into a serial port or vice versa.