Nice summary. They are versatile pieces of kit. I used to use the F)orward and B(ackward commands to swap sessions rather than resuming them. Another feature of some of them that is quite handy is "reverse LAT", where the terminal server can offer a LAT service that connects to one of the serial ports. This is typically used for remote consoles. (e.g. hook up your VAX console to a TS port and create the reverse LAT connection. You can then connect to the console from anywhere on the network). Cheers,
Thank you :) Reverse LAT sounds interessting, something to try out soon :) With "F)orward and B(ackward" I have to swap through all session, hard to say, what is faster ;)
@@DECcomputers You can define hotkeys. I think I had ^F defined which makes for fast switching. Of course it was a long time ago, so my memory might be a bit fuzzy.
Back in the late 90's when I was a kid a local public library had DEC terminals spread around the library for people to search books. Don't remember the exact models but I was amazed as a kid by how different those machine were compared to typical Windows PC of the time. I had no idea of the concept of terminal server and wondered how could it work since it was just a keyboard connected to a monitor which had a cable with weird connector going to a wall socket because all the PCs I've seen had always this big bulky box right next to them that adults were calling computer.
My 200/MC is my favorite serial kit. It is way more fun than the newer Avocent serial terminal servers I user. I set up a MOPD server on an Ubuntu VM to boot it and use it solely for reverse LAT. As they age the fans tend to go and shortly after the power supply if your not watching!
The fans sounds a bit strange at the moment, but that can be caused by my cleaning attempt. I think that I'll change them soon. The PSU seems to be fine, quite untypical for DEC equipment that age ;)
Thanks for that nice trip down memory lane.. I've worked with the whole range of DECservers and DEChubs with their weird rack backplanes etc back in 1999 during my first practical semester at Uni. It was quite a different time back then.. things were a lot easier and less convoluted to use. I'm a bit sad now that I didn't keep any of the stuff when we modernized the data center, but back then it was mostly slow 10Mbit gear and nobody thought that retrocomputing might become such a big thing a few decades down the road.
It's an interesting part of the history of networking. I got my DEBhub 90 when I was 14 in 2003, and it was my first DEC product ever. It's 10 Mbps, but it's from the early 1990s with hot-swap capability; a product I really like. I will make a video about the DEChub 90 soon, in which I will also show some other modules :)
Back in high school they ran a thicknet 10base5 cable between 2 buildings. They had two of those backplane plug in units in your video at 0:15 sec. at each building. They had nice vt220, 320 terminals connected and then standard 10base-2. Across town they had a frame relay line with I don't think it was a dec terminal server. Plus the fame relay modem and I think a multiplexer. Maybe a dec mux. TO many years ago. I do know when they said all the terminals was being used or somebody was printing among other things. It would over load the frame relay line and everything would goto a crawl.
I think they were quite common in the 90s. You could also connect two of the DEChub 90 backplanes with a BNC and an MMJ cable to expand the backplane, but then you have a pretty big collision domain and with too many clients it could get very slow. There was also a bridge module to avoid such a large collision domain.
@@DECcomputers Yea, That is what they did. Not sure why they dragged a large thick net cable between the 2 building. But it looked cool with terminators and such. Also grounding.
@@DECcomputers I had no problems understanding you and I am an English-only speaker. Lots of memories from my days at Kodak when I was a systems admin. DS100's were terrible (dropped sessions all the time), 200's and 300's were solid. The 300's were especially useful with telnet, allowing users to connect to Unix and CDC Cyber systems. Used the DS900's a lot too.
![DEC Terminal Servers - DECserver 90 / 200 [Kind of English]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
