Rats--have they always been neg. tip?

[rhys]

a guy just gave me his old rat that wasn't working.  i opened it up and a leg of one of the caps had broken off.  replaced the cap and now it's working fine.  it's my first rat and i'm really digging it. 

anyway, the board has the date 1986 but this one does have an LED so looks to me like it might be an 87 or late 80s.

does anyone know if these always were negative tip?  i have a mini-jack i can use to power it instead of having to put in the boss style adaptor, but i don't want to fry the pedal if it's not negative tip.  (i've looked at some schemos on the web and they all look negative to me so i'm guessing this one is negative too but i'd rather get some confirmation.)

[Mark Hammer]

Some 98% of pedals that use mini phone jacks for power adaptors use a positive tip.  The reason for this is that only the tip can be used to switch between the internal battery and an external source.  On a barrel jack, the outside of the shaft is used to do this.  Additionally, while the nature of barrel jacks often allows the designer to have the pin or the shaft connection to be connected to ground, very few mini phone jacks do NOT have the shaft connected to ground.

[Processaurus]

Yes, I put a boss type dc jack on mine so I could use it with my daisy chain, it was definitely positive tip, to add that experience to Mark's logic.