>Being Burroughs, it may be VERY WEIRD. Sort of
somewhere between smart
> (IBM) and dumb (DEC). It will probably only want to talk to a
> Burroughs.
Hey, I like weird! But yeah...I'm getting the impression from the
manual this is not an ordinary serial term (though it does have an EIA
interface.) I don't think it emulates anything, except maybe other
Burroughs terms.
It has been almost 20 years since I used that stuff, I did work on
Burroughs on mainframe-PC integration and terminal subsystem stuff for
three years, so I should remember some of it, shouldn't I?
Almost no one was using MT-985 when I got there in 86. We all had ET-1100s
and ET-2000s (a Burroughs PC clone that was also a Burroughs terminal). I
don't recall them having any dumb serial terminal capability.
It was a block mode terminal where the mainframe application would send
down the form (a mix of text and formatting codes) in one chunk and the
terminal would display it, then the use would fill in the fields and send
it back to the application in a block when the user hit the transmit key.
Electrically, we always used a two-wire interface (TDI or Two Wire Direct
Interface). I recall that the connector was a DB-25, but only two pins
were used, but that could just be bad memory.
The protocol used to communicate with the terminals was called Poll/Select.
It was half duplex. The terminal processor (can't remember what those were
called in Burroughs-speak) would go through the terminals attached to it
and query them to see if they had anything to send and, if a terminal did,
it would.
Given how hard it is to find info on Burroughs stuff these days, I wish that
had saved more stuff when I left.
alan