Used in anger?? I don't get it?

I have used a shorting block connector in a design that was done back in '84 where I made a system with a daisy chainable bus. It was similar to RS232 but of my own design. The design was done such that a master could talk to a series of slaves. Each slave had two connectors on it, a slave IN and a slave OUT. The IN connector came from the master or the previous slave. The OUT connector was designated to go to the next slave. In those days it was hard to find drivers like RS232 that could tristate and support multi-drop so the scheme was that the master would transmit on one wire plus a return to all slaves in parallel. The return signal path from each slave was daisy chained through each slave via a repeater pair with logic in between to let the slave insert its transmitted packets at an OK time while cutting off the receiver part of the daisy chained slave to master comm line. The actual direction of signal flow for this "to master" comm line went from slave 1 to slave 2 and finally at the last slave. There is was setup to loop back to a wire in the cable chain where it went hard wired all the way back to the master. This loopback was done via the shorting bar of the last slave since there was no cable connected to the OUT port of the last slave.

Now the whole scheme may sound a bit complicated (or fascinating) but there was another whole part of the protocol scheme that required this topology. There was an automatic enumeration of all the slaves that permitted the master to automatically assign addressing to each slave so no switches or address jumpers were needed.

I could describe it more if I drew out how it connected. You see that from those days I have no electronic records of the schematics.

Mike Karas