Need serial cabe for pdp 11/34 M7856

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sun, Jan 15, 2017 at 1:56 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>     > i need a cable that is wired for serial.
>
> The EIA serial cables that plug into the Berg connectors are pretty much
> unobtainium.

There's' the BC05C and the BC01V... it's true that it's now hard to
get a vendor to list prices, but there are piles of them "in the back"
that aren't worth sorting through unless you know you have a customer.

I never thought of them as unobtanium, but we used to make our own
cables of this style for COMBOARDs that also have EIA lines for
TxClock and RxClock on DB25 pins 15 and 17.  Other than that, they are
remarkably simlar to DEC cables, right down to the DuPont housings on
the 40-pin end.

> I have a couple that came with an 11/04 I bought, but I've never
> seen one for sale, individually. So yes, you are going to have to make one.
> Fortunately, that's not too hard!

Agreed.  Plenty of docs on classic sites for BC01V and BC05C.

> The same search terms should provide the pins, too. The quality will be
> pretty crappy, but I find working with regular electronics suppliers' sites
> to be too painful (for me, at least).

We used to get the pins from Digikey or Mouser.  Last I checked, they
were somewhere around $0.25 to $0.40 each unless you bought a big bag.
Back when I was making cables for COMBOARDs, IIRC, they were around
$0.09 to $0.15 each in bags of 1,000.

http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/hard8e/bc01v.html

http://gunkies.org/wiki/DEC_asynchronous_serial_line_pinout

-ethan