It has a k-b attached with ribbon cable
Unfortunately the keyboards were not that robust and after a few
generations of students pounding away on them, the keyboard or the
ribbon cable often became unreliable.
Alas the ribbon cable is soldered at the keyboard end, using one of those
staggered pin transition headers. A minor pain to replace.
Well the bottom of the connector was soldered but it was one of the old style
whose name escapes me. The lid prys off and the cable is impaled on pins which
have a matching indentation on the lid. I've had success repairing those
before. The main care is that the cable is alligned straight . I used pliers to
re-impale the cable between the top and bottom sections and lock it back into
place. I remember doing it with my old Micom k-b many moons ago and was
pleased that it checked out on my ohm-meter. Mind you that test could give you
wrong results if you were shorting out 2 adjacent wires and there's no guaranty
that the cable was alligned correctly. I have to get a new cable in any case
so I wasn't very impeccable..
That video
connector on the back was useful for hooking into a big
classroom overhead monitor so a whole class could learn from observing a
terminal session.
When I got my VC414, it was faulty - no display at all. The video output
connector quickly proved that the logic boards were fine, and that the
fault was in the monitor section. A little bit of debugging later (this
was 10 years ago...), and I found that the CRT was faulty - the cathode
had broken away from its pin. Getting a new CRT was non-trivial.
-tony
ciao larry
lwalker(a)interlog.com