Wonko said:
> i have a HP dumb terminal someone gave me, all i need to do is short out pins
> 8 & 9 on the printer port and wire 1, 2, 3 & 7 the the correct place on the
> terminal and i'll have a console?  

That's correct. Your HP should be set to 9600 baud, no parity, 8 bits.

> cool, i don't care to buy/find something i could build with junk i have laying
> around. :)  would NetBSD allow such a thing as well? 

Yes, it should. I'm not far enough along in dorking with NetBSD on the 2000 to
say for certain.

> and now one more question about the VS-2000.  on the NetBSD web page under
> supported platforms it mentions something about VS-2000 SCSI.  

The motherboard has an NCR 5380 SCSI controller on it. You could buy an 
expansion box for the 2000 which, among other things, included a cable to
plug into the SCSI port and bring it out to a 50-pin Centronix-type
connector. DEC supports only tape on this bus, so if you hook a disk to
it you won't be able to boot from that disk. Perhaps you could load the
boot program from floppy and have it load the kernel from the disk; I don't
know yet, I've not yet taken a good look at Bertram's code.

If you look at the motherboard, there are some connectors next to the
power connector. Looking at the front side, they are to the left of
the power connector. The 50-pin connector is SCSI.

> size and speed some to mind when i want
> to replace the ST251 with a 1G SCSI. :)  

Bear in mind that the SCSI port on the 2000 will never be a high 
perfromance thing. The 5380 is not terribly intelligent, so the CPU has to get
involved in most phase transitions. There's a reserved chunk of memory to
which the 5380 has DMA access, but the CPU has to copy data into and out 
of this chunk, etc.

> there is a 50-pin internal SCSI socket
> shapped thing, is that the SCSI??

If you're talking about the 50-pin connector to the left of the power
connector, yes.

Roger Ivie
ivie@cc.usu.edu