New Buy & VMS help wanted - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

1 Feb 2002

On February 1, Pat Finnegan wrote:
...
  I also picked up its console cable and an LK-401 for
it, but didn't see
 its mouse laying around. :(  Anyways, the 'console cable' connects to the
 framebuffer and provides a modular jack (LK-401 im sure), an 8-pin
 Mini-DIN (mouse?), and a single BNC connector.  Does anyone know of a sane
 way to connect this to a garden variety monitor?  Is it really monochrome
 as I suspect?  The framebuffer cards are a M7168 and a M7169, so I
 *thought* it would be 8-plane *color* graphics... but I guess 8-plane mono
 is believable.  Anywho, if the TK50 remains, it'll have to be the
 framebuffer that goes away when I get that pertec card.. 
  That frame buffer is a VCB02, or QDSS.  M7169 is the smarts, and M7168
is a memory board.  You can have one or two M7168s, each gives you
four bitplanes...so you have a 4-plane framebuffer.  This can drive a
color monitor for 16 colors or a mono monitor for 16 levels of gray.
Which monitor you can drive depends on the cable.  From your
description, you have a grayscale cable, used with, for example, a
VR160 monitor.  A color cable will have three BNCs.  I've found the
grayscale cables to be somewhat rare.

  I wouldn't bother trying to drive a VGA monitor with this.  Proper
DEC monitors are relatively easy to find, and I find them to be of
much higher quality than all but the most expensive PeeCee monitors.

...
  One last thing... on VMS 1) how do I figure out the
size of the
 hard-drives (like du on *nix), and 2) how do I mount a hard disk without
 knowing its label?  The second ESDI drive doesn't get automatically
 mounted when VMS boots. 
1) $ show dev du/full
2) $ mount du?/override=id
     (where "?" is the unit number)

    -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf