Along comes the Mac, and a better way. How about this: either you are a piece of equipment, I'll say "box" henceforth, or you are a cable. Cables have male connectors and boxes have female. Cables have signals going into them on particular pins, and leaving on other particular pins. And so forth. You plug it in, it just works. What a concept!!
The only problem left is connecting to things with the old connectors. Here are a couple of hints.
Macintosh (DTE) Modem (DCE) DIN-8 DB-25 Pin Signal Signal Pin 1 HSKo --------------------------- RTS 4 2 HSKi --------------------------- CTS 5 3 TxD- --------------------------- TxD 2 4 GND --------------------------- GND 7 5 RxD- --------------------------- RxD 3 6 TxD+ (nc) .-- DSR 6 7 GPi (nc) '-- DTR 20 8 RxD+ --------------------------- GND 7 shield --------------------------- shield Figure 1If your modem cannot be configured to ignore DTR, or if you are using an old 1200 baud or 2400 baud modem, the pinout in Figure 1 is probably best. However, if you are using a high-speed modem that can ignore DTR (and/or Remote AppleTalk) you should instead use the pinout in Figure 2, which is the pinout "recommended" by Apple:
Macintosh (DTE) Modem (DCE) DIN-8 DB-25 Pin Signal Signal Pin 1 HSKo ----------------------+---- RTS 4 '---- DTR 20 2 HSKi --------------------------- CTS 5 3 TxD- --------------------------- TxD 2 4 GND ----+---------------------- GND 7 8 RxD+ ----' 5 RxD- --------------------------- RxD 3