Maybe it's a silly question, but why is it needed to have a USB converter? Specifically, in the article, they mention connecting to a raspberry Pi. Couldn't they use the UART serial port on the GPIO of the Rpi? I see the baud rate seems limited to 4800, would that be the issue? (I don't know how this stuff work, I often use serial port to connect to my SBCs - RPi or similar - and I would love to use a minitel for that after reading the article ^^)

You don't if you are going into a serial port on the other side. I chose to go USB because it gives me flexibility to connect into a Raspberry Pi or my Mac or ...

Oh yes, you can of course skip the USB FTDI and use the Pi's GPIO, I forgot to mention that.

Hi Alduin32, May I ask you a related question? I bought recently a VaxStation 3100 and tried to connect to it with a USB FTDI (I didn't try hard), but I was unable to get anything.

Do you have a suggestion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAXstation

You do need to turn on the "alternate console".

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms/c/CKTvD6yObJ4/m/t9rS...

And page 230 of this pdf: http://www.vaxhaven.com/images/0/00/EK-VSM31-OM-002.pdf

Thanks for the tip. I think mine was up but I will check again.

Also, try <ctrl-p> to send a break.

Thank you! Really appreciate it. Will start with the paperclip test from the article.