DEC stuff is so cool! They were sneaky and smart!

From: B'ichela <mdalene_at_home.ctol.net>
Date: Fri Oct 29 21:46:34 1999

        I tried that downgrade from VT180 to Vt100 and you know what? it
Works! Now heres a little Cool (good compliment) to those wonderous DEC
engineers who must have loved to play with weird and unusual designs. Py
point of View also stems from my expirence with my Rainbow 100 Computer
and what I learned about Both the Vt180 and the Rainbow 100.
        DEC's engineers loved to lay their add-on boards flat. Unlike the
IBM Pc type of Perpendudicular layout.
        Dec loves to stack addons on top of addons! Lets see, the VT100's
AVO is stacked on top of the Controller, the STP board has a small
satelite board on top of it. (I made a goof when I said there was an
ocilator circut on it. it consists of 3 chips. Lets say you wanted to make
an Addon for the AVO.. EASY! Stack one More on it. Oh yeah, you are out of
room there. Oh well. so run a ribbon cable to the two Empty Card cage
slots of my Vt180!
        These people from reading "Hackers" loved to allow people to
tinker with their stuff, Dec loved them so much that they sold Service
manuals with diagnostics and programming info! I have the Rainbow 100
TEchnical guide and the admendum which tells you alot about How the
various boards work! In fact the MIT hackers added additonal instructions
to thier PDP computers (the older transistorinzed one *PDP 8?) Its quite
a shock compared to the modern plastic, glued shut and disposable
technoligy of today).
        Their Idea of a Self Shorting Card slot blew my mind! Never saw
anything like that in my 31 years of life! Remove the STP and what you
got? a standard WORKING Vt100? No soldering! No trace cutting? and I love
this! No DIP Switches to switch!
        In fact I bet one could even replace that STP with a generic
computer such as the SB180! or perhaps the guts of a H89 (using the Vt100
as a console!
        While we are praising the older computer technoligy lets not
forget the H19/H88/H89 system. Like the Vt180 it was a terminal (H19) with
the CPU daugher board BEHIND the Terminal controller. From my futzing with
the system to fix my H88 that broke. (No, sigh.. its long gone) You had to
unbolt the board, unplug the Serial cable to the H19 board plug one of the
serial cables from a serial port into the h19 connector and Volia!
Instant H19 Terminal! and it had a "Flip Top" Case!

                A pearl of wisdom from the y2K newsgroups:
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Y2K appears to be the Baby Boomers mid-life crisis, and it has the
potential to be a dandy.
                        -- Anonymnous --
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                        B'ichela
Received on Fri Oct 29 1999 - 21:46:34 BST