On 2011 Jul 17, at 5:39 AM, David Gesswein wrote:
Anybody happen
to know whether a bare Decmate like this (no
keyboard, no disk drives) should display anything on-screen upon
power-up?
I just tested mine (has COMM board). It displays nothing on the CRT
until
the keyboard is pluged in. After that it displays setup.
Just took a look at the schematic to see what it might take to fake a
keyboard enough to fool it. A little experimentation and it turns out
that connecting the data line (ring) to +12V (tip) after it has been
powered up (seems to need the transition after power-up) brings up the
SET-UP message and flashing cursor after a few seconds.
Interesting signalling scheme on the data line, bidirectional
signalling is accomplished with some comparators and resistor networks
(and some C) on each end, but it seems the keyboard is also clocked
from the processor/terminal end. So the one data line
is carrying 3
signals: clock and data to the keyboard and data back from the
keyboard.