On Sat, 13 May 2000, Rink Springer wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I got a VAX 4000-300 recently, and I'm trying to get the beast running. I've
> got a DEC VT320 terminal with it plus keyboard, so that should work... the
> point is, I didn't get *any* cables with the box, so I went to a local radio
> shack and had them make a cable from that weird 6-pinned DEC plug to the
> same weird 6-pinned DEC plug on my terminal. The cable is one to one (eg pin
> 1 from the VAX reaches pin 1 of the terminal and so forth and so on). I
> plugged the cable in the connector with the two 'arrows' above eachother:
> 
> <---
>  --->
> 
> In both the VAX and the console.
> 
> When I turn everything on, nothing seems to happen! My console shows the
> intro screen, and when I slam a key, it just shows the normal display.
> Nothing ever gets there!
> 
> I can hear my VAX spin up the disks, and it appears to read data from them
> (I have NO clue what's on the disks). The display on the VAX has shown a lot
> of numbers, but now it's just stuck at 6. I've turned the dial to be at
> 9600bps, which my terminal uses, but I never get any data!
> 
> Does anyone know what I should do?

Sorry for the long quote. I didn't see any obvious good places to cut it
short, and I didn't feel like removing the whole post I'm replying to.

Anyway, I would say that your cable is wrong. The terminal and the VAX
most likely have the same pinout (they are both DTEs after all) which
means you are connecting Tx to Tx and Rx to Rx. Not a very useful thing to
do. What made you think of doing it that way? :-)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol