Jeff Schroeder on 24 Mar 2002 00:13:16 -0000


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Re: hosers-talk: RS/6000 console


At 06:10 PM 3/22/2002, Tom Plagge wrote:
In addition to the old AS/400 I have sitting around in my room at home,
I now have an RS/6000 running some old version of AIX.  It has a Power
processor (not a PowerPC, but close) and a bunch of serial ports on the
back; with my official IBM terminal, I can get an AIX login simply
by plugging into one of them.

I'm at school now, though, and the terminal is at home.  I want to use
the serial port on my PC.  I gather from Google that the IBM serial
setup is sort of braindead, using some sort of nonstandard pinouts, but
I thought maybe one of you (Jeff?) might know how to deal with it.

I don't know too much about these old RS/6k's... I imagine that what you'd have to do is first get the hardware communicating. Find a schematic of your favourite port and compare it to the generic RS232 pinout. Does your port have 25 pins or 9 pins? Round or trapezoidal? If it is the same, all you need is a null modem connection. The next step would be to get a program to communicate. I think the old RS6k's used VT5280 or 3164 (from memory, might be a bit off). I remember using a special program when I worked at IBM that had these terminal settings. If you use the wrong terminal you should at least get a connection of some sort...

What model RS6k do you have? a 43p? :) probably a 390 or something. Does it have a key in front? What terminal were you using? An X-station or an ASCII terminal? That would give you a key. Try this page for a list of computers.

http://www1.ibmlink.ibm.com/cgi-bin/master?request=salesmanual&parms=SMS&xh=5ivD9xQNiuBgzx1USenGnN9332&xhi=usa.main%7Csalesmanual%5E&type=D&search=rs%2F6000&title=T&product=

jeff