woah - our email system's actually running at something faster than a crawl!! :) My memory's hazy on this but I seem to recall the following: There's two connectors on the back of the machine labelled 'A' and 'B' - one a 9-pin connector and one a 15-pin. 'A' is for the console terminal and 'B' is for a remote diagnostic modem (ie. a remote terminal). Regular serial lines are of two forms: a bunch of 15-pin connectors at the back, or a smaller number of larger connectors (I seem to remember my 700 having the latter but the serial card I have that I pulled from that old 400 has the former). I think what the current owner of 'your' machine has is a breakout box which converts one big connector to several smaller, individual serial lines. I *think* via software you could say where the console was - on the dedicated console port (which plugged into the system backplane if I remember right), or on one of the serial board's tty lines. I'm not sure if there were restrictions in doing this; I suppose there's nothing special about port 'A' - it's just that a machine might not have any serial boards installed. Corrections to that are welcome from other list members, as it's been several years since I seriously played with one of these systems! bye! Jules