A few years ago a manager at the local McDonald's gave me a Wyse wy-55 dumb terminal that was used as a ticketing KVS system from their kitchen. I tried to use this once before but couldn't get a working keyboard for it. I found a cheap used keyboard for the system on ebay for 20 bucks. It's a life time of a deal since most places want at lest 59 bucks for a used keyboard. All whats left is a USB to RS-232 Serial adapter and a day of figuring it out.

Until the keyboard gets here im going to paint the case to the terminal black and gray to match the rest of my hardware.

And what on earth do you plan on doing with it?

From what I've seen of his endeavors in the short time since the merging of the forums, I was wondering the same thing, but lean towards some use for it.

Or it's just to see if it can be done.

I run a IRC chat room and this terminal will be handy for that. Not to mention for email, newsgroups and some old classic text based muds.

The keyboard came in today. The keyboard had some odd quarks but a simple tear apart and cleaning took care of that. Now to order my USB to serial adapter and build a null modem cable.

I'm going to skip painting the system for now. Just want to get everything up before I decide to paint.

Don't mind the big dark PC like tower, it's my hackintosh.

Got the Null modem cable built and also was lucky enough to find a USB to serial adapter at the flea-market for 5 bucks.

Spent four hours getting the terminal to talk to the hackintosh and finally got it working. I used this guide to setup the host end and had to figure out the rest on my own with the terminal. Sadly there isn't a manual laying around let alone a downloadable manual or e-book for this terminal. Right now im playing a classic MUD D&D style on a friend's server. Later on I need to set the terminal on it's own stand. I have a little file cabinet that has wheels, should be perfect so I can roll it around the desk when I want to use it.

I forgot to mention on how I built my cable. The Wyse terminal uses two DB25 RS-232 female serial ports. My Hackintosh has a single DB9 serial port but OSx does not see it so I have to use a USB to RS-232 converter. You would think the null modem cable would be simple but not really. The pin layout on the terminal is different.

Terminal side, im using no handshaking BTW

Pin 1 Frame Ground
Pin 2 Tx
Pin 3 Rx
Pin 7 Signal Ground

Typical PC pinout Side
Pin 2 Rx
Pin 3 Tx
Pin 5 Signal Ground
Shield Frame Ground

At first it would think a serial extension cable with a db25 male adapter would work but the grounds wouldn't match. I decided to make things easy by using some old serial to RJ45 adapters. The pins can be switched around so everything will match.

Also the neat thing with these adapters if I ever want to add hand shaking I can just repin the adapters.

After a few days I ran into some issues so I built a simple script and enabled hand shaking.