Projects

DEC VT320 Terminal - October 26, 2025

This is a terminal, built by Digital Equipment Corporation in the late '80s through the early '90s. This particular unit was made on December 22, 1990. It has a green phosphor CRT, other variants were made with white or amber phosphor CRTs. I purchased this locally, and bought a keyboard on Ebay to complete it (the keyboard is DEC proprietary). I also had to install a DE-9 cable for serial, as I do not own any of the proprietary DEC cables to connect to it (pinout in the photos below!). It is a reversible modification, but necessary for me to use it. I have connected a few of my machines to it so far, such as my Slicer single board computer, SGI O2, and Space Byte 8085 computer. It is quite nice to have a real terminal finally, especially one that natively uses the same terminal interface we so commonly emulate on modern computers (VT100!). At this point it works quite well, so I don't think I will do anything to it yet, but it would be a good idea to change the capacitors in the near future as preventative maintenance. Updated 11/06/2025