Serial console problems on 11/34

Julian Wolfe wrote: Could the problem be on the terminal end? 1. One thing to check for is that you have a good ground (pin 7 on the DB25). I've had weird problems like this when the ground wire was bad. You can also get strange things like short transmissions look good, but long ones are messed up garbage (or vice versa). 2. Test that the terminal is actually sending the character. Short pins two and three on the VT220 DB25 (transmit and receive pin) to create a loopback connector, and see if what you type gets echoed back on the screen. VT* terminals would sometimes fry the interface chips. The VT320 could fry MicroVax II console ports when you turned the terminal off. 3. What speed it this operating at? Sometimes the clock frequency drifts (either, or both ends of the connection), and at higher speeds it is enough to make things act flakey. Slower speeds aren't as badly affected.