On 2015-Aug-19, at 2:17 PM, Ethan Dicks wrote: > 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).
Thanks, that was a question I had been intending to ask, but to confirm: If one obtained (as appropriate) bare RX01/2 floppy drive(s), it would just be a matter of power supply for the floppies, and passive cabling to interface the drives to the CPU/display? I actually have the DB25-to-DC37 cable that goes between the disk unit and the DC37 connector on the CPU/display unit. If we move this along we may be asking for system software in the future, I haven't looked at what may be readily available (i.e. bitsavers) as yet.
