For a while I had a VT520 console lying around. I connected it once to a debian machine.
Connecting was easy since I only had to connect the serial cable and edit /etc/inittab, removing a ‘#” in front of this line:
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
After adjusting the baudrate from 9600 to 115200, otherwise the screenscrolling is extremely slow, only a: “telinit q” was enough to bring the console to live.