[HN Gopher] Digital VT100 (1978)
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Digital VT100 (1978)
Author : Breadmaker
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-02-03 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oldcomputr.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oldcomputr.com)
| abraae wrote:
| Old video terminals demonstrate the beauty and timelessness of
| solid protocol design.
|
| While old computers are effectively useless except as
| curiosities, an old video terminal is still just as good at its
| job as when new.
| jandrese wrote:
| Back in the 90s I had to do some on-the-spot coding to fix a
| problem on a SGI machine using an ancient green terminal of
| some kind. It worked, but the keyboard lacked curly braces {}
| so I used trigraphs[1] for the first and last time.
|
| The fact it worked at all is pretty impressive. There was even
| a termcap entry for the ancient and crusty terminal.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| Most quirky VT100 feature: smooth scroll.
| hazeii wrote:
| Managed to score a _lot_ of points once by having a columnar
| display collapse itself with smooth scroll to make space for
| additional info beneath it (define a scroll region over the
| centre part of the display, cursor position to the bottom and
| print more stuff - with line drawing chars forming a grid the
| effect was very effective).
|
| Smooth scroll is actually quite easy in hardware, as it's just
| a case of changing the scan line offset by 1 each frame. A
| small handful of TTL chips will do it, later a small tweak to
| the CRT controller, and nowadays about a bazillion CPU cycles
| to do it in software.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Most quirky, IMO: double-high/double-wide characters.
|
| Most obnoxious, from the standpoint of a terminal emulator
| developer: origin mode.
| rbanffy wrote:
| The VTE folk didn't like when I brought that up. It creates a
| number of interesting corner cases with text reflow on window
| resizes.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Sadly I never convinced the VTE maintainers that it'd be a
| nice-to-have.
|
| To be frank, it'd require some departures from the original -
| speeding up to consume large off-screen buffers and slowing
| down to a human pace when the buffers clear - and, like any
| extra feature, it'd be a burden to be carried for the
| foreseeable future, so I completely understand them saying a
| polite, but emphatic, no.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Brings back memories. I worked at Digital for a while, and we got
| those things at transfer cost. So all our team had them, until
| the VT220s came along. They could do lower case. !!
|
| It has to be said, plastics technology has improved a bit. Those
| things weren't UV stabilized at all.
| floren wrote:
| Old video terminals are beautiful. I owned an ADM-3a for a
| period, but gave it to a fellow collector because the flyback
| transformer whine gave me headaches (he's old enough that he
| can't hear it). The VT100 definitely lives near the top of my
| wishlist... I've got a nice pair of Amiga machines, but I'd trade
| them both for a working VT100 with very little hesitation :)
| hazeii wrote:
| The first place I worked, the grunts got teletypes but the boss
| had an ADM-3A.
|
| Later on, I used a lot of different VT100 compatibles, plus
| genuine VT100s/VT10xs and (on occasion) ADM-3As. All connected
| to PDP11's of one sort or another.
|
| Personally, the nicest one I ever used was a Pericom [0], about
| the only model that I'd rate above the actual VT100. It had a
| few annoyances related to imperfect VT100 emulation, but it has
| the sharpest screen ever (there was some sort of a fine black
| mesh over the tube that enhanced the display).
|
| [0]
| http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800...
| mprovost wrote:
| I was digging around the Unix history repo and found a BSD
| program cat3a [0] written by Bill Joy in 1977 to "cat to an
| adm3a quickly". It blanks the screen and prints a file
| directly to the tty at 80 columns wide. Of course that's the
| terminal that he also wrote vi on - it has arrows on the hjkl
| keys.
|
| [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-
| repo/blob/BSD-1-S...
| shimonabi wrote:
| I had a chance to buy a VT-101 a few months ago, but without the
| keyboard. Maybe the guy still has it.
|
| I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a
| Raspberry Pi.
| guenthert wrote:
| The RPi has a serial port on which Linux can present a console.
| It's just a matter of converting the 3v3 RX/TX signal to some
| 12V RS-232 level. Plenty of devices or instructions out there.
| floren wrote:
| > I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a
| Raspberry Pi.
|
| Should be quite easy. You'll need a USB-serial adapter for the
| Pi, and a cable with a 9-pin serial adapter on one end and a
| 25-pin on the other.
|
| Now, the way my luck works, it usually turns out that my random
| assortment of serial cables means I end up with the USB
| converter, a null modem adapter, the serial cable, and a 25-pin
| gender-bender just to get all the wires in the right order and
| fitting into the ports properly :)
| mmastrac wrote:
| Hugged to death. archive.org link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210119124740/https://www.oldco...
| markc wrote:
| I still have my VT100 "Keypad Condom" - a rubber overlay for the
| numeric keypad for the EDT editor. A great editor it was too!
| W-Stool wrote:
| Way back in the day (late 70's) I worked on VAX systems for a
| large automaker whose management sincerely believed if you
| weren't using some monster from IBM you really weren't doing much
| important and thus there was never enough funding to go around to
| make sure everyone in the VAX group had a terminal on their desk.
| In my group there was some real status of having your own VT-100
| on your desk and I still have the b/w photo of me at my desk the
| day I got mine.
| Diederich wrote:
| I would _love_ to see that photo.
|
| Starting in the late 1980s, I spent a lot of quality time with
| DEC VT220 terminals. Solid buggers.
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