The HTC Evo and a VT125

This follows on from my previous blog post about booting ancient OSes on emulators for ancient computers on your Android phone.

Since I still have an extensive collection of vintage DEC hardware, I decided to extend what I had been working on by connecting some vintage hardware up to the emulated system.

The first thing I had at hand was a DEC VT125 terminal - a close relative of the VT100, which includes some added graphics support. A quick power-up verified that it work. Now, to get it to talk to my phone's emulated VAX.

Now, I didn't have any good way of connecting a serial port directly to my phone, but SIMH does support a telnet connection to the emulator's console by doing a command like this (2301 is the TCP port to accept connections on):

sim> set console telnet=2301

Now, to create a telnet session from my VT125, I grabbed a Xyplex MAXserver 1640 from my bastement. These are similar to a vintage DECserver, but support telnet (and many other things) in addition to the usual DEC-specific LAT protocol. Basically, I can hook a terminal up to this, and use it to telnet to a host. It also works the other way around, so that I can hook a system's serial port up to it (such as a console port), use telnet to connect to the MAXserver, and connect to the serial console on the physical machine. This later setup is something we do with systems at work, and is very commonly done, as opposed to connecting serial terminals up to network-attached hosts, like I am trying to do.

For the purposes of this post, I won't go into detail on how to set up a MAXserver, but I basically placed a boot image on a tftp server, told the MAXserver to boot from that image, gave it an IP address, and told it to reset itself to default settings.

To connect the MAXserver to the VT125, I used a RJ45 serial cable (a "roll over" cable) and DB25 to RJ45 adapter, which has the same pinout as a Cisco RJ45 to DB25 DTE serial cable. Ethernet then connects the MAXserver to my home network.

Next, I set my phone to connect over WiFi to my home network, and noted its IP address. After turning on my VT125, booting the MAXserver, and starting up the emulated VAX on my phone. From there, I told the MAXserver to connect to my emulated VAX console:

Xyplex> connect 172.27.3.150:2301

Now, just boot the emulated VAX, and enjoy!

I have more pictures up on my flickr account.

Back again

After a bit of a hiatus from posts, I'm back again.

I've finished a big hurdle in the start of downsizing and creating focus in my computer and interesting technology collection, and after finally buying a house, I have completely finished moving out of a ~2500 sq ft warehouse that I was using to store my collection. At its peak, it was stacked high with equipment, and paths to navigate through the space were sometimes non-existent.

I have since resolved to limit the size of my collection, and thus the number of projects that I want to do. As a direct result of my massive work in downsizing (with critical help from friends for some larger items and a push to finish up towards the end of July - but otherwise mostly done by myself over the January through July of 2010), I now have time to work on projects instead of just spending all of my time moving things back and forth.

I replaced my old iPhone 1.0 with an HTC Evo, running Android, back in June when they came out, and have been exceedingly happy with it. As a direct result of how easy it is to hack and develop on, I have started some projects involving running computer simulators on it. Currently, I have the set of VAX emulators (VAXstation 3900 and VAX-11/780) from Bob Supnik's Simh emulator collection running both 4.3BSD and OpenVMS, with a minimal amount of work.

I have posted pictures of 4.3BSD running both on the Android emulator, and my phone on my Flickr account.

My next post will describe what I had to do to get Simh to compile and run on my phone, and after playing with that, my next target is the Hercules IBM Mainframe emulator.