[jff]

What's most amazing to me is that this got so much press. Maybe OS X is ridiculously hard to set up, but I've been doing this on and off with my own VT 220 for the last 5 years on Linux. It's just... not that big of a deal. It's not archaeology, it's just pointing getty at /dev/ttyS0.

I've done it with an ADM-3A from the 70s too, it's just. Not. That. Tough.

http://imgur.com/bRnST here's me, years back, hacking on a VT 220

[johncoltrane]

I don't think it's implied anywhere that it's hard or novel. He simply is more connected than you, that's all.

[derleth]

On the hardware level, does the VT 220 connect via a standard nine-pin serial port?

[kps]

"standard nine-pin serial port"

Them's fightin' words, boy.

DEC had a DE9 serial port connector whose pinout is not the same as the later IBM PC DE9 serial ports.

[jasomill]

IIRC, while the VT-220 had both 9-pin and 25-pin RS-232 ports, the 9-pin port was used to attach a printer. You also typically need a "null modem" adapter or cable to connect a terminal directly to a PC serial port (or USB serial adapter).

There's lots of original documentation for DEC VT series terminals here[1].

[1] http://www.vt100.net/

[jff]

It has a 25-pin serial port which converts to a 9-pin serial port by a simple passive converter (basically, just ditch 16 of the pins and route the others properly, you can actually do serial with just two wires). Same goes for the ADM-3a