31 Mar
2001
31 Mar
'01
3:57 p.m.
Chuck McManis wrote:
I don't know if it is a DEC part or not. I didn't make it, but found it
at a surplus electronic shop. I wish I had the materials to make my
own. I bought some wire, but I don't have the connectors or crimpers.
The wires are kind of hard to see on the cable I have. I plan on
checking continuity to see how that thing is wired.
If after the above test, you see the characters you
type getting echoed on
the screen, then you know that the VT320 is working and the cable does not
have any breaks in it (you don't know if the cable is wired properly but
unfortunately.) You can test proper cable wireing with an ohmmeter or a
lightbulb/battery/two wires circuit. Check to see that pin 1 on one MMJ has
continuity with pin 6 on the other MMJ, then 2 and 5, then 3 and 4 etc.
I re-tried a 2 line phone cable I bought at Lowes. I filed the
connectors down so I could plug them into the MMJ ports. This time it
worked. I must have had everything else mixed up, last time I tried
this cable.
I am now wandering aimlessly around the console monitor. Anything I
should do while here? I don't know how to do much, but I did find that
I could "show mem" and it reports 44megs of ram. I also did "show
qbus",
but it didn't tell me much. I was hoping it would tell me what cards I
have installed, and what they are.
I did boot the machine... well sort of. It tells me that it has OpenVMS
Vax version 6.2, major version 1, minor version 0. It also reports
pagefile.sys, not found. The licenses are expired, it was shutdown
improperly, the disk is full, and that a whole bunch of files are
inaccessible, and then eventually goes back to the >>> prompt.
What now?
Chad Fernandez
Michigan, USA