Painting the Lines on the Road: Connectors
Imagine that you see a new road that has just been paved. The
road is so new that the DOT hasn't even painted the lines yet. So, you turn onto
the road and enjoy the ride. After a couple of miles, you look up and see that
someone else is on the roada huge, speeding truckand the driver wants to take
his half of the road in the middle of the road. After swerving off the road, you
might think to yourself, "Boy, that reminds me of one of the reasons that you
use connectors on the end of networking cables!"
Okay, that's far fetched, but it does lead into a key point
about connectors. If roads had no lanes, and there were no traffic laws, the
roads would be pretty dangerous so the DOT paints lines on the road to create
traffic lanes. Similarly, connectors line up the wires on the end of a cable
into well-defined physical locations inside the connector. Essentially, each
wire in the cable is identified by color, and each colored wire has a specific
reserved place inside the connector that the electrician attaches to the end of
the cable. The connectors put the wires into the right place, just like the
lines on a road guide cars into the right place.
An electrician can take a cable and attach a connector to the
end of it. When he attaches the cable to a connector, each of the wires
protrudes into the connector so that the electricity can flow when connected to
a device. The tip of the exposed wire in the connector is called a pin. A pin is nothing more than a
physical position in the end of the connector in which the copper part of the
wire sits. You can think of a pin like you think of a lane on a road. Figure 4-7 shows a photo of a typical
connector, called an RJ-45 connector, along
with a drawing of the same connector.
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