[rescue] VCF East - my big purchase!

[Lionel Peterson]

So, today I was at VCF East, and I spent the day with Glitchwrkz, building my
8085 single-board computer and CF adapter board w/ CP/M 2.2 pre-installed, and
I had a good time.

I twice made the mistake of putting the wrong IC in the wrong spot on the
board, but thanks to their handy desolder station we were able to correct that
issue both times.

Bottom line, both boards worked on first power-on - very happy with that.

And while I wait for my terminal kit to arrive (see previous posts from last
week), I made a great discovery in the vendor area. A gentleman had two
Raritan serial converters for their KVMs, called an AUATC. This little box is
made to either put a serial device on a Raritan KVM, or to take a monitor
(composite sync for Sun equipment or VGA for other) and a keyboard (PS/2 or
Sun keyboard) and make a serial terminal on an 800x600 monitor.

The seller was smart enough to print out the user manual and keep it with the
item. That explains exactly how to set up the serial terminal setup,
confirming it will be perfect for my application.

And the cost? $20/each.

The AUATC documentation says it is VT100 compatible, and should interface
nicely with my new 8085 board AND my soon-to-be-built PC2014 kit I found in a
drawer from a few years ago...

If this works, it will be much better than trying to nurse a beat-up terminal
from 40-50 years ago back into operation. I was tempted to pickup a wyse 60
terminal, but decided against it, now I'm glad I did.