3 ms·
If you do wish to play around with it, given the age, I would suggest having someone familiar with older power supplies and CRT displays to test the PSU and CRT
by retrac 3y ago
If you do wish to play around with it, given the age, I would suggest having someone familiar with older power supplies and CRT displays to test the PSU and CRT high voltage circuits.
It's possible something of that vintage will have a capacitor fail shorted, and applying power could fry what would have otherwise been a relatively easy fix. They're basically museum pieces at this point, and somewhat valuable (both $ and historically) if it is working regardless of cosmetic condition.
- mprovost 3y agoI used to buy old DEC terminals on Ebay in the early 2000s (there seemed to be a lot of stock from US Post Offices, you could tell from the burn in on the screens) and hook them up to a x86 FreeBSD desktop. I think the 320 was my favourite - they had great keyboards. That was my cheap multi-monitor solution back then - just run terminals with separate keyboards! Of course this was when we had cubicles with enough space for that kind of thing... I was doing sysadmin work back then on big Sun servers which were located in another state anyway but I used to get a kick out of showing people walking past that I was running harrypotter.com from a screen session on a VT320. Anyway one day I came back from lunch and everyone was standing outside the building with the fire department. A capacitor on one of my beloved terminals had blown and the smoke set off the fire alarm. After that my boss quietly asked if I could leave the vintage hardware at home. Although soon after we discovered a stack of old SGI Indy workstations left over from the VFX on some movie...