On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Brent Hilpert <[email protected]> wrote: > Would anyone have a surplus-to-needs, or know of a source for, a VT100 > keyboard?
I have terminals and keyboards, but I don't know that I have more working keyboards than working terminals. > This would actually be for the DECmateI/VT278 I mentioned on the list a > couple weeks ago, Rob and I are looking into doing something with it. Cool. I have one of those myself - just the basics - no addon cards, one set of floppies (room in the pedestal to add more), but I do have the "desk" upgrade (a metal clip that mounts where the keyboard tray normally goes, and a desk top and left-side leg so you have a workspace right in front of you rather than hunching up in front of the pedestal). > Alternatively, does anyone know if there is any degree of signalling > compatibility between the VT100 and VT220/320 keyboards? None. The VT100 keyboard is 3-wire: power, ground, and bidirectional data with a dumb hardware UART in the keyboard; the VT220/320 keyboards (LK201 et al.) have a 4-wire interface with power, ground, tx, and rx, and a sophisticated (by comparison) character protocol. > Those RX floppies in the pedestal on ebay mentioned a week > or two ago were just what was needed to complete it, > as they actually looked like they were part of a 278 Yes. Except for missing the "wood" top, that did look to me like a VT278 floppy pedestal. You don't "need" that if you have room for a side-by-side RX01 or RX02. That pedestal is just mounting and packaging (along with a passive DB25<->Berg 40 adapter). You could use the same floppy cabinet as a MINC-11 with (AFAIK) the same cables. I think there is only one DEC standard for running an RX drive over DB25. The only part that might matter is RX01 vs RX02 (I _think_ MINCs came with either by the end). Either way, the floppy drive guts are all the same across all the lines. You can just get them in 3 packages (rack-mount, tabletop, or pedestal). It's only about mounting (and 40-pin internal vs 25-pin external). -ethan
