On 6/7/06, Henry Ji <ying6926 at ureach.com> wrote: You will almost certainly not be able to use a PC monitor with this. If you have a DE-9 connector as your output, I'd expect that the video card in the VAX is looking for a monchrome monitor like the ones on Sun3 workstations. My memory is that DEC color frame buffers tended to have BNC connector or DA-15 connectors, not DE-9s. If you have a monochrome buffer, the video signal will be nowhere close to what a CGA or EGA or VGA monitor is looking for - it will be more like a workstation "megapixel" monitor wants to see - much higher res than EGA or VGA. A high-res modern monitor might be adaptable, but you might need to invert the H sync and V sync, or combine H and V sync into Composite Sync, etc. It will be helpful if you open the machine and determine the model number of the frame buffer cards in the VAX. That would allow folks to give you specific suggestions on what monitors might be compatible. One of those DE-9 connectors is probably the console serial port. With the right combination of switches on the back, etc., and the right cable (*not* a PC serial cable), you can hook up a dumb terminal or PC running a comm program to watch the boot and probably to log in. Many VAXen were used this way, without any frame buffer whatsoever. You could at least determine the OS version, etc., and even to break in and reset the SYSTEM password, etc., from a serial console. Yes... you are looking for handle numbers on the cards like M8xxx that will identify what options are in your machine. With module numbers, you can determine what frame buffer is in there and what sort of monitor it is expecting. Is there a TK50 drive in the machine? (identical cartridge size to a DLT/SDLT) Also, if there's a floppy drive, it's most likely to be an RX50 - single-sided dual drive. It's possible to write those from a PC with a 5.25" drive. When the OS is running, you can make a backup tape, or you can boot without worries that some program has some file open. Boot a Standalone Backup TK50 or RX50 set. When these machines were in common usage, folks with software support contracts would get new OS distributions on some form of tape (TK50, 9-track...) along with the latest Standalone Backup set for whatever boot medium they'd registered with their contracts. I have seen SA Backup on TU58 (small tapes), RX50, TK50, and RL02, depending on the target machine. -ethan