DEC M3134-PA DS500 module

Richard wrote.... Let me say first that I am not at all familiar with the M3134. However, I think you're missing the basic concept here. The IBM coax terminals do not speak ascii, nor do they speak RS232. Nor are they character based like ANY and EVERY terminal you've probably delt with before. The electrical spec isn't similar to RS232 but current loop... it is a fundamentally different thing. These terminals are not only block mode, they speak a VERY robust protocol between the host and the display. It would be quite difficult to make sense out of the datastream between the terminal and host in a character based environment. Again, while I don't know for sure... I would bet some cash that the M3134 probably provided an electronic connection for the terminals, you probably had to do a world of programming on your own to actually talk to those units. And you probably had to develop your own protocol for dealing with fields/pages being sent back and forth. Perhaps DEC supplied a toolkit for doing so. But in any case, I suspect that even with their tools, you would NOT get a RSTS logon prompt on one just by using this card and writing a little code. You probably would get a toolkit that you could use to send and receive a page at a time to the terminal... basically you'd probably get an I/O device under program control. Jay