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Terminal hook up

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Tyler Thenikl

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Apr 15, 2012
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Hey everyone, I recently acquired a vintage dumb terminal and I'd like to hook it up to my pc and run it off of freebsd or similar hardware. The problem is that I need some help. The terminal does not have any cables or anything with it and I'm not entirely sure that it works. It has a male 25 pin connection on the back for power and data transfer from a computer. Can somebody tell me what I need as far as cords or lend me some advice to hook it up? I would like to hook it to my computer with some sort of usb or vga connection if possible. I'd be more than happy to provide some more information. PLEASE HELP!
 
You'll either need a null-modem serial cable if the terminal is DTE (likely) or a straight serial cable if it's DCE (some terminals have and can maintain sessions on both.) It would really help if you could tell us more about what model the terminal is or if you could find a manual for it.

Also, I seriously doubt that it gets power over the serial connector.
 
Oh, yeah, it does take power over the cable. Huh. In fact, from the description, it doesn't seem to be properly a terminal so much as a CRT display with an ASCII keyboard. I don't know that you're going to get this to work with anything but the equipment for which it was intended.
 
Do you think that I could possibly use it as just that, a monitor and keyboard? I realize it wouldn't be like you average, day to day monitor display, but would that work? It seems like if it would, I would still be able to run a terminal emulator or and just have that on the display to get the effect
 
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Sounds like you found the same manual although they might have some additional documents in that http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectorGraphic/ folder of theirs.

I'm not sure but I imagine if you were so inclined if you can find a pinout of the power pins in the serial line you could make your own serial cable and splice in power from an external supply assuming the pins aren't used for anything in the serial communication protocol.
 
Tyler Thenikl said:
Do you think that I could possibly use it as just that, a monitor and keyboard? I realize it wouldn't be like you average, day to day monitor display, but would that work? It seems like if it would, I would still be able to run a terminal emulator or and just have that on the display to get the effect
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Not without hacking up some hardware to drive it; at that age it's definitely not just a monochrome VGA display. I'm not sure what the sync rate is, but it's really probably not worth all the trouble. And I don't think the keyboard is even RS-232, it looks like a parallel connection. If I were you, what I'd do is find a Vector Graphic collector to sell it to and buy a conventional serial terminal with the money.
 
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