[HN Gopher] 1980 Terminal with Linux - TeleVideo 950
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1980 Terminal with Linux - TeleVideo 950
Author : ecliptik
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-05-13 15:08 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| cricalix wrote:
| I recommend checking out his other videos too - the series on the
| Hydro Thunder machines was good, complete with reverse
| engineering the disk layouts and raw data storage setup, with the
| software available on GitHub. He can usually be found on Twitch
| on a weekend, but is currently on a break to the end of the month
| due to running past his connection transfer limits (can't even
| pay for more data).
| blueflow wrote:
| Still supported by the terminfo db! If you ever use that to
| access a linux machine, do an export TERM=tvi950 and your TUI
| apps should be fine. Unicode support not included, sadly.
|
| Edit: As shown in the video after minute 28
| mprovost wrote:
| I would be surprised if anything has ever been removed from
| terminfo. Thomas Dickey is doing God's work.
| chasil wrote:
| I have a real vt100 in my basement, not sure if it works.
|
| It would not be difficult to attach and run mgetty on the serial
| port.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| My arm boards have no GPU but do have a USB to serial adapter
| built in...
|
| Setting it up was as easy as editing inittab to disable the
| stock ttys and enabling ttyS0. (Systemd is a little more
| complex, but afaik it's the same except its unit files instead)
| blueflow wrote:
| Some things i had to consider with my vt520:
|
| - Not all baud rates work reliably, the higher ones cause
| screen corruption probably due to clock drift
|
| - Flow control is required because the terminal is likely not
| fast enough to keep up with all output. Software flow control
| (XON/XOFF) can't be used with tmux because tmux is hard-coded
| to disable it
|
| - No support for unicode characters
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how fast can you go? I think the default
| for my board is 115200, haven't tried going higher.
| blueflow wrote:
| 115200 is out of reach for 80ies hardware. I ended up
| picking 9600 as standard for my retro stuff because
| that's the highest the IBM PC supports.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 9600 is what I remember from the terminals at school at
| that time, they had rooms of them for students, I think
| they went to a serial multiplexer of some sort in the
| room, then over ethernet to the host at the "computing
| center." Or maybe it was serial the whole way?
| nubinetwork wrote:
| When our work was mostly dumb terminals, they would have
| a db25 to "rj45" adapter, then using a plain cat5 cable
| to a box called a terminal server (we used xyplex).
|
| From the terminal server to the actual server was legit
| Ethernet, and we would address the terminals as a term-
| server-ip:port combination.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Makes sense. Cheers
| retrac wrote:
| If you do wish to play around with it, given the age, I would
| suggest having someone familiar with older power supplies and
| CRT displays to test the PSU and CRT high voltage circuits.
|
| It's possible something of that vintage will have a capacitor
| fail shorted, and applying power could fry what would have
| otherwise been a relatively easy fix. They're basically museum
| pieces at this point, and somewhat valuable (both $ and
| historically) if it is working regardless of cosmetic
| condition.
| mprovost wrote:
| I used to buy old DEC terminals on Ebay in the early 2000s
| (there seemed to be a lot of stock from US Post Offices, you
| could tell from the burn in on the screens) and hook them up
| to a x86 FreeBSD desktop. I think the 320 was my favourite -
| they had great keyboards. That was my cheap multi-monitor
| solution back then - just run terminals with separate
| keyboards! Of course this was when we had cubicles with
| enough space for that kind of thing... I was doing sysadmin
| work back then on big Sun servers which were located in
| another state anyway but I used to get a kick out of showing
| people walking past that I was running harrypotter.com from a
| screen session on a VT320.
|
| Anyway one day I came back from lunch and everyone was
| standing outside the building with the fire department. A
| capacitor on one of my beloved terminals had blown and the
| smoke set off the fire alarm. After that my boss quietly
| asked if I could leave the vintage hardware at home. Although
| soon after we discovered a stack of old SGI Indy workstations
| left over from the VFX on some movie...
| tom_ wrote:
| I've got a tvi910+. It looks cool. Check it out:
| https://deskthority.net/wiki/TeleVideo_910 (that's a 910, but the
| 910+ looks exactly the same)
|
| I switched it on in 2019. Probably its first run since the late
| 90s. It started up fine, but the screen was filled with junk -
| hmm, did it always do that? I tried to connect it up to my Mac
| using some dupont cable, but I couldn't get anything useful to
| happen. I triple checked the pinouts but I could easily have got
| them wrong.
|
| It had a 6502 in it, and what looked like an EPROM. I put
| "investigate possibility of plugging EPROM into BBC Micro, dump,
| disassemble, diagnose" on my todo list, and I put the terminal
| back in a cupboard. But both items are still where I left them.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| This is the real thing, but the cool-retro-term software[1] is a
| fun 'poor-man's teletype' to emulate the aesthetic!
|
| [1]: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You can also run an emulated VT100 and VT220 in MAME. Couple
| that with shader effects to add scanlines and pincushion
| distortion and you get a passable facsimile.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Wow ok I was expecting a emulator or a look-a-like app but this
| is a real beige computer from the 80s
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(page generated 2023-05-13 23:01 UTC)