So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" port. [...] To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on how these things operated?

It's neither X nor ethernet. These worked with a special controller card that had 4 RJ45 connectors. That allowed four users to share a single Windows NT system. ________________________________ From: cctech <cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of John Ames via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:41 AM To: cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>; cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> Subject: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" port. I got it bare, without the external PSU that would've gone with it, and I've since been unable to determine just what the heck I'm supposed to feed this thing. It's a standard barrel jack, but there's no markings on the case or the PCB to give any clue as to what voltage/amperage or polarity it expects, and Google has been no help at all. Does anyone have any recollection of these things? Any idea what they want for juice? To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on how these things operated? Given this, my only guess would be some kind of insane networked-framebuffer scheme where the host would blast video data in on the fly, but there's no way this was even 100Mbps Ethernet, and 10Mbps isn't nearly fast enough to transfer 150KB at 60FPS, and there's no memory to buffer it for a slower refresh. What in the heck is going on here? This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain privileged, confidential, proprietary, private, copyrighted, or other legally protected information. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual or entity designated above. If you are not the intended recipient (even if the e-mail address above is yours), please notify us by return e-mail immediately, and delete the message and any attachments. Any disclosure, reproduction, distribution or other use of this message or any attachments by an individual or entity other than the intended recipient is prohibited.

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:01 AM John Ames via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote: It's a text mode, which generates the screen image using rasterized fonts from the text + attributes stored in video memory. There is no frame buffer. With that little RAM it can support the text modes easily enough, but none of the graphics modes. Warner

So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication" port. [...] To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART, and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen, not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on how these things operated?