19 Aug
2015
19 Aug
'15
10:17 p.m.
On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
Would anyone have a surplus-to-needs, or know of a
source for, a VT100 keyboard?
I have terminals and keyboards, but I don't know that I have more
working keyboards than working terminals.
This would actually be for the DECmateI/VT278 I
mentioned on the list a couple weeks ago, Rob and I are looking into doing something with
it.
Cool. I have one of those myself - just the basics - no addon cards,
one set of floppies (room in the pedestal to add more), but I do have
the "desk" upgrade (a metal clip that mounts where the keyboard tray
normally goes, and a desk top and left-side leg so you have a
workspace right in front of you rather than hunching up in front of
the pedestal).
Alternatively, does anyone know if there is any degree
of signalling compatibility between the VT100 and VT220/320 keyboards?
None. The VT100 keyboard is 3-wire: power, ground, and bidirectional
data with a dumb hardware UART in the keyboard; the VT220/320
keyboards (LK201 et al.) have a 4-wire interface with power, ground,
tx, and rx, and a sophisticated (by comparison) character protocol.
Those RX floppies in the pedestal on ebay mentioned a
week
or two ago were just what was needed to complete it,
as they actually looked like they were part of a 278
Yes. Except for missing the "wood" top, that did look to me like a
VT278 floppy pedestal. You don't "need" that if you have room for a
side-by-side RX01 or RX02. That pedestal is just mounting and
packaging (along with a passive DB25<->Berg 40 adapter). You could
use the same floppy cabinet as a MINC-11 with (AFAIK) the same cables.
I think there is only one DEC standard for running an RX drive over
DB25. The only part that might matter is RX01 vs RX02 (I _think_
MINCs came with either by the end). Either way, the floppy drive guts
are all the same across all the lines. You can just get them in 3
packages (rack-mount, tabletop, or pedestal). It's only about
mounting (and 40-pin internal vs 25-pin external).
-ethan