Ah, serial cables, he said, smoothing his flowing but greying locks...
When I was a young Mr Larrington taking his first tentative steps into BOFHdom, Important People in my then-employer's IT department had a hardwired terminal via a serial cable anything up to a hundred and fifty yards long and the riff-raff had to make do with accessing the VAX and/or PDP1 via a primitive network, which involved miles of co-ax, desktop boxes which converted RS-232 serial-speak at 2400 into something that could be fired down the co-ax, and a bunch of rack-mounted things that translated it back before feeding it into the Babbage-Engines. The limited number of rack-mounted things meant not everyone who wanted in could do so at whim and there were frequent "Is Your Session Really Necessary" reminders. Not that the Babbage-Engines could have coped with that many lusers anyway, especially if the mad Yugoslav nicknamed "Vlad the Compiler" was one of them.
If you were Very Important - the IT Director, the system mangler or the BOFH - then you were allowed to jibble the printer port on the back of your terminal to accomodate a second hardwire into the PDP. Which needed a different cable. I had boxes of 25-pin RS-232 shells and connectors under my desk and a GBFO reel of 4-core serial cable strategically placed for lusers to trip over if they came a-whining about the line printer running out of paper, the laser printer needing hitting with a hammer again or the plotter drawing pretty pictures on its own bed because some gobbin had forgotten to put in a sheet of shiny and expensive paper before stabbing <RETURN>.
1: The VAX was for SCIENCE and the PDP for word processing. Payroll was done on a Mac!