Also I would like to apologize for my English level - it is not much in use nowadays in my environment.
May the Omnissiah bless you with cognition and clear mind.
Once I was looking for some old artifact of the Dark Age of Technology - the model m keyboard.
I've heard some legends about the True Click sound and started a journey to find the one for me.
It costs a fortune in my land but the one who seeks is always found and I found a whole IBM 3486 terminal with a model m included for the price of the keyboard alone.
And I've got it in the pretty good shape, working but the power button needs to be keep pushed all the time. (strange, but all terminals, which were selling in my country has the same issue.....)
Before buy, I've asked a rogue traider who got this for me about a possibility to use it for the nowadays cogitators and he gave me a link to this thread.
Emperor protect inmbolmie! The guy did the awesome job and created a tech artifact which helps us to use an unbreakable terminal for an usual ssh.
Then I've started crawling through the libraries of Mars(The Internet) for some lost paper who may describe the possibilities of my terminal.
There is an old fairytale about a guy who catched a pike(a fish) and she granted him magic power in return of her freedom - any time he saying "At the will of the pike, at my will..." and his wish - it magically become true.
So I've tried to use a few Machine Spirits (language models) to find an info for me - Grok, ChatGPT and DeepSeek.
Making long story short - the datasheets of this terminal were lost in time during the accident in IBM library and now even Reddit people don't have any doc accessible. IBM 3486 have two ports - DB15 (twinax) and db25 which is LPT. The most accurate LM were ChatGPT, which said, Omnissiah bless his lexmechanics techpriests, that it is for printers only. The rest two said it is RS232 and I have no issue to connect this terminal to any COM-port supporting cogitator, which is false(may the Machine God punish those Machine Spirits by the unpopularity). That is how my fairytale ends without proper beginning.
The moral: check the answers of the bots.
Unfortunately the only founding was a marketing reference guide for such terminals which just said that my terminal is monochrome, has 80x24 symbols and it should be connected to some mainframe. Breaking news!
Ok, it is still twinax protocol so the idea of using 5251 converter looks possible. The only one difference I would like to put here is - I wanna use this terminal as a terminal - possibility to connect thought it to the other "mainframes" (linux computers) via ssh.
Right for that reason, I bought Orange Pi Zero 3 - it have wifi, ethernet and UART. The last one is important because all that connections in the mentioned article made thought usb just because there is no other ways of communicating between teensy and a PC.
Using Orange Pi as a target for twinax made lot's of possibilities - since 3486 is an text terminal, you can use usual bash to be you interface. And bash can do everything literally - you can catch DHCP in a guest network, you can plug in a wire, you can connect any device via USB...
So I chose this variant instead of local connection (which is still the case, if you catch my drift).
The scheme will be discussed in the next post, but I want to say in advance that an old logic chips are quite expensive in my state and the longest part of my job was to find analogues in the local market. Most of the chips are chineese, so you may order them easily.
See you at the next post!