It actually kind of makes sense that the "back space" goes back a space, and the "delete" key actually deletes a character.

@user-fh2fm7vr4m

Жыл бұрын

This is my experience with AS/400 as well, at least thru terminal emulators.

@southernflatland

Жыл бұрын

back space backs a space delete key deletes a key Gotcha 👍

@randomdesign6304

Жыл бұрын

That's how they worked back in the day, including on DEC VT terminals. So it's not a weird mapping, it's correct by design.

@deang5622

Жыл бұрын

Backspace goes back a single character, not a space.

@tramadol42

Жыл бұрын

​@@randomdesign6304 Absolutely, it went so far that on the keyboard of my good old Siemens terminal, the key has a double label: "Backspace / Backstep". Together with the Shift key, it sends the code for "Delete".

22:41: Just for the record: SystemD is event driven, so you can actually configure the units to only start agetty when the USB adapter is plugged in. It's also possible to use udev to do that but going via SystemD might be more elegant. Of course, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to go through that hassle for a one-off presentation.

@hobbified

Жыл бұрын

The events are coing from udev either way, it's just a question of whether it works better for you to have udev do a thing, or have udev tell systemd to do a thing.

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

SystemD is decades removed from traditional POSIX/Unix systems that were born for serial and considered the local PC as just a serial terminal sharing some of the computer hardware. I'm old enough to have used the original tools on Linux machines with no local screen at all. I have also used a real terminal connected to a VAX .

Shelby, you are like a drop of water in a desert. While a lot of your videos may not have any effect on my life, but it is always lovely to listen to your voice and wisdom.

@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger

Жыл бұрын

"you are like a drop of water in a desert" Insignificant?

@Dinnye01

Жыл бұрын

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger Don't be an asshole. This is a reference of the opposite: when a drop of water means the world.

@RadikAlice

Жыл бұрын

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger Complete opposite actually

@kaitlyn__L

Жыл бұрын

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger I presume they meant a drop of water for a person in the desert, not just water in the desert in isolation :P

Very early in my programming career, it became my job to write terminfo files for clients to be able to use our product's Unix version with all the formatting and whatnot that could be mustered on whatever hardware they bought, since the built-in ones were either insufficient, wrong, or missing entirely. And a short while before that, I had used many different hardware terminals in college, where the TVI950 was a staple. Big nostalgia here!

@ChrisGonnerman

7 ай бұрын

Yeah, I wrote termcap and terminfo files for various terminals on a variety of mid to late '80's Unix systems. That was... fun... for some definition of fun anyway. Never used a TVI950 but spent a lot of hours programming a Motorola 68000-based computer using a Motorola M220 terminal. Even played around (in off duty time) with reloading character sets.

@TheGreatAtario

7 ай бұрын

@@ChrisGonnerman Unix terminfo authorship fistbump!

@ChrisGonnerman

7 ай бұрын

@@TheGreatAtario Thanks. Not the most fun things I've done in service to the computers, but neither is it the worst.

I love how this video is half "Retro hardware repair" and half "Wizard explains how not to luse with unix; luses anyway". Very aligned to my particular interests!

@sadmac356

11 ай бұрын

Same honestly

When manufacturers still had confidence in their customers

@professorpwerrel

Жыл бұрын

For real, that manual is evidence that the right to repair has been eaten away at. For companies like Apple, their main argument is essentially that people are too stupid and will end up hurting themselves. So how much are they trying to say humanity has deteriorated since the 80s?

@Okurka.

Жыл бұрын

These were sold to professionals.

@EssenceofPureFlavor

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, I don't think that's really it as much as it is the intended market.

@EngineerOfChaos

Жыл бұрын

@@Okurka. While true, even now things are much more sanitized to make it easy.

@ByronGoodman

Жыл бұрын

Systems came with getty configured already. They typically would auto-discover the terminal, unless someone forced it (we did have scripts). They were very simple to setup. He is kinda doing things very backwards compared to how we did it in the 80s. inittab would spawn the serial sessions. I don't miss the days of abusing wall, and .plan files. I could never go back to writing code on one of these. You lived in emacs, and emacs was your 'screen', or 'tmux'. I still use emacs today, but it is painful over a serial port.

You should be using the `reset` command when changing term types too. You may even need to cycle power on the terminal if the terminal gets really freaked out.

I disagree with the statement that 25 pin connectors had more flow control. IBM introduced the 9pin version because its smaller and it has all the serial handshake lines that are used for rs-232 communication to modems common in the 80’s. Tx, rx, Cts, rts, dtr, dsr, cd, ring, gnd. The 25 pin connector has other pins defined for synchronous serial clock signals, secondary serial channels, and a bunch of unused or reserved pins. None of which were useful for a pc connected to a common async telephone modem or serial printer.

@ChrisGonnerman

7 ай бұрын

Most of the extra signals of the DB25 version weren't used by basically anything by the '80's. Not sure how much they were used before that, as I started college in 1983 and that's when I started getting serial terminal experience. Used to know the main pinouts for a "proper" null modem cable by heart. GND is GND, RX crosses TX, DTR crosses DSR, RTS crosses CTS. Just don't remember the numbers now.

I would love to get a vintage terminal like this and use a Raspberry Pi booting to serial. The irony is that how powerful and small the Pi is compared to the computers this terminal connected to when it was in its prime.

@Sylvan_dB

Жыл бұрын

Could easily find room inside the terminal to mount the Pi. Just keep it away from the high voltage. With a bit more work you could use the Pi's built-in TTL serial direct to the terminal (bypassign the RS232 level conversion in the terminal) but you'd need to protect the Pi against the (probably) 5v TTL serial in the terminal.

@samuraidriver4x4

Жыл бұрын

That's what Shelby did with another terminal. Works pretty good and there should be a video of it I think.

@fuzzywzhe

11 ай бұрын

No you wouldn't want this. What would you do with it? A raspberry pi is as powerful as the Unix mainframe I was on in 1990. Why would you want to use this terminal? This terminal was designed for monochromatic graphical display. Did he even demonstrate that? If you want an "old style terminal", get a VT-220. That's just a 80x24 colum display (was it that? Something like that..) There was the VT-100 as well, but I hated working on them, they had lower resolution to draw the characters, much harder on your eyes. This terminal is not something you'd want to try to use. The backspace key, ALONE, makes is entirely frustrating to use. We had a bunch in college, but the only thing people used this for was to show pictures, then log off. I never once saw a person working on one. They were replaced by the NCD X terminals which were just dumb terminals that ran X11 in them, designed to be black and white - they were usable but I don't even know if they would be compatible with modern X11. You could, conceivably (?) run an NCD against a raspberry pi, but I'd check first. Those would be entirely usable if they are compatible with currently X11. And you don't want to go back to 1990 anyhow. You really don't. All of this stuff was neat at the time, but it's downright primitive today.

@esra_erimez

11 ай бұрын

@@fuzzywzhe Yes. Yes, I would. Its the physical personification of putty

@fuzzywzhe

11 ай бұрын

@@esra_erimez Why would anybody want to use putty? When I think about it, I'm not even certain this terminal is entirely compatible with the VT100 character escape sequences to allow you to run an editor like VI or Emacs on it. Maybe Ed. These sequences are necessary to position the cursor. Good lord, I'd never want to go back to stone knives and bear skins again. I used to be quite expert with the VT220. You could reprogram the font. Somebody used a program I wrote to make a video game, I think it was one of those pipeflow games. Interesting, somebody made BoulderDash on the machines, but they didn't use my program to do it, however I used my program to recode their version of BoulderDash to run on a VT100.

I'd forgotten about termcap and terminfo. Way back in the 1980's I supported an equivalent system for a locally developed operating system so knew far more than was sane about the escape sequences of the 30 or so terminal types we supported. I feel old.

Just wanna point out, DB-25 actually has pinouts for two full serial ports and all the control lines. Most of the time the second port went unused; so it was reduced to the DB-9 we are more familiar with today.

Support for 40+ year old serial terminals in Linux is actually surprisingly good, considering much newer stuff has already been thrown out of the mainline kernel. Like 486 CPUs or IrDA adapters...

@PinguimFU

Жыл бұрын

Wait irda was also thrown out? 😮

@JdeBP

Жыл бұрын

Well strictly speaking the terminfo support isn't anything to do with Linux, as it's not done by the kernel at all. All that Linux deals with is the serial port, and ironically that is _not_ 40 years old. it's a relatively new USB device, which one wouldn't have had 40 years ago. So Linux is supporting a quite recent device, and it's only the non-Linux part of the operating system (Linux being the kernel, of course) that is supporting the 40 year old stuff. Using a PC that has an honest-to-goodness serial port on the mainboard would be more like Linux supporting old stuff. (-:

@gamagama69

Ай бұрын

@@JdeBP i mean a lot of modern motherboards have a serial header through the superio. i have one with a port adapter and im curious if this would work with this. just dont have room for a massive terminal that i realistically have no use for but i kidna really want one to screw around with

This was a great lesson in serial connections in general. I appreciate you sharing all that info about terminfo, termcap, and screen. I was struggling big time with my TRS Model 102 and connecting to a Pi. It worked but I couldn't get the nonsensical characters to go away despite changing term types. The screen trick worked! Now I have another use for screen other than keeping my IRC session running in the background ;-)

Watching the terminal setup on Linux reminds me of doing that with a Unix System 3 with 24 serial ports...around 1983. I used to carry a rs232c 25/9 pin breakout box with LEDs and a peg matrix around in my pocket all the time!

Fun fact: the old televideo terminals were used in the video War Games :) (I checked the rom dump of a 912 and built a PC font from it, it’s identical)

It seems fitting for me to comment on this video. ;) Terminal types are such a pain in the beehive. Even when you're running 'modern' terminal emulators it still causes pain and confusion if you're working on different systems through SSH. Great video, this! Thanks!

@retsamyar

8 ай бұрын

heh for some reason idk if it was because i learned computers in the early 90s as a preteen or what but working through terminals and screens don't cause that much confusion. One of my fond memories is the old internet dialups came with unix shell accounts. That way you can get things fast to your shell from the internet and then slowly download later.

There's no fundamental reason why all the features of this terminal do not work with Linux. The termcap definition is just incomplete/wrong. Someone just needed to get some basic stuff working with this terminal and submitted an incomplete/wrong definition and no one has cared ever since. Just like there are tons of non standard keyboards that don't have proper definitions that don't work fully with Linux because no one bothered. Maybe try with a BSD.

@athompso99

Жыл бұрын

In general, Linux and the major BSD flavours all share the same ncurses-supplied termcap, so this sadly probably won't make any difference. If you want a proper tvi950 termcap, you might have to go back to the SunOS 4.x era, maybe a 2nd-gen SVR4 system like Unixware. [Source: I am a termcap/terminfo author for several terminals, but not the TVIs.]

@nickwallette6201

Жыл бұрын

So true. Linux _seems_ like it has all this support for a huge variety of platforms and modular components, but in reality, if you're not running it on x86 hardware with a modern ANSI-like terminal and a recent GCC with full GNU life support system, well... good luck to you, sir.

@KnutBluetooth

Жыл бұрын

@@nickwallette6201 I'd go further and say that Linux only runs well on hardware that is 1) supported by hardware vendor employees that contribute to the kernel 2) hardware that is used by big companies who can pay for employees to fix bugs in the kernel 3) hardware that is used personally by Linux kernel programmers. Outside of that sooner or later, you're out of luck because of the constant code churn in the kernel breaking things without testing on hardware that doesn't fall in the three cases I mentioned. These days Linux crashes all the time on the very same 32-bit hardware where it used to work flawlessly (no regressions with the appropriate Windows, so it isn't a hardware malfunction). I had to buy another damn video card recently because AMD employees that "maintain" Radeon stuff in the kernel do not fix any bugs for perfectly working hardware they deem "too old". On the other hand, I don't think you really need GNU stuff. Alpine with musl/busybox works fine.

@nickwallette6201

Жыл бұрын

@@KnutBluetooth That's very true. I have a VIA Epia board that is pretty much unusable on recent x86-32 Linux due to various hard lock-ups and extremely poor throughput on at least the IDE half of a PCI controller card under the sata_promise driver. Also tried to use a Matrox G200 on another older box, figuring that ought to have great driver support. Nope. Completely broken. Just random garbage on the screen. I do love open source projects, but the downside of no official support channel is that code maintenance follows volunteer dopamine.

@KnutBluetooth

Жыл бұрын

@@nickwallette6201 Except for hardware vendors who are quick to abandon support for their own stuff, I don't blame them. I'd be even willing to pay a reasonable amount of money so that kernel programmers could be hired publicly to maintain older hardware in Linux. But I'm pretty sure this would be opposed ruthlessly with lobbying just like 'right to repair" laws.

I love the beep. Had one of these with a modem in 1995. If not this exact model, then close. Ah, the days of Gopher and Annex.

Terminal printing isn't something I've even thought about for far too many years to mention. If done properly a long print job could be interleaved with normal user activities rather than occupying the terminal with printing for the whole duration of the job. At least in my experience printers were usually on their own separate serial port from the mux or host rather than the terminal.

I did something like this with a Zenith EasyPC 20 years ago. That thing had barely more cpu power than a terminal. It only had a "mouse port". Well, it actually was a serial port with a lot of stripped pins of D9 connector. Configuration was a lot easier since i could just use a dos terminal program. Midnight Commander was the end boss when battling code pages and terminal configs. In the end it really looked like a terminal from the mid to late 80s. With Lynx i could even browse the web (back then it was easier).

I normally hate artificial keyclick sounds, but the beep on this one is dreamy :)

@liamwatson5125

Ай бұрын

I can’t get enough of that beeping either.

termcaps are fun. I had to keep a suite of cobol programs working under linux for many years. For what ever reason the authors had hard coded it to work with SCO-ANSI only and the SCO-ANSI that was available for linux was incomplete at the time. Fortunately I had a copy of SCO, the suite was originally targetted at SCO, and was able to swipe the file from there.

screen was actually the first thing on my mind when you mentioned those character issues as I know it can fix those when set properly. It may have been struggling for you but me as a viewer, these old terminals look freaking awesome!

Reminds me of the DEC VT100 Series of Terminals. Very similar in many regards.

It is absolutely amazing that this series of serial adapters can interface with USB and therefore a modern computer, especially given the age of this hardware. Truly amazing!

You could make an executable launch when you press the key. The screen memory sends to printer memory without the program appearing on the screen "echo off". I remember this program had to be in the DOS ready to run. It was great to magnify graphics onto the dot-matrix printer with simple multiplication. It was a BBC Model B with no print screen facility. A long long time ago...

Also, in almost all cases, control-H works as a backspace. It even works in Apple II Basic.

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

That's because backspace is ASCII character 8, so on anything resembling a serial terminal, it's the same as sending the 8th control code via ctrl-H . Similarly delete is character 127 (which makes a lot more sense when using 7-hole punched tape to write teletype messages to be sent directly to another terminal over a pay-per-minute phone line. The huge problem is that someone in the early days of Linux swapped the two ASCII codes and insisted their nonsense was the correct behavior for the local Linux console.

Man, that thing is filthy. Excellent practical demonstration of the capacitor reforming decision tree. I wasn't expecting to see a 6502 family of parts in there. CRT cataracts are the degradation/oxidization of the epoxy layer between the safety layer and the glass of the CRT itself, rather than mold. Great video, glad to see the TV950 in action!

I just love hearing that beeping the terminal makes when you type. Such a soothing sound. Dot matrix printers always shake the table as a result of particle transfer to the surface.

Your videos bring me immense joy. Even in areas that aren't my specific interest. Your dedication and care is rewarding within itself.

Wish I had this guy's knowledge. I saved all my early computers, printers, etc, and in much better shape than in the barn like here! I have this same Televideo 950, and plenty of other stuff, including a very early heavy and expensive S-100 CP/M system, even massive heavy 8" floppy drives in a frame weighing at least 80 pounds. It would be fun to get some old stuff working again.

Lovely ! Brings me back to the good old days when VT100 was the state of art and I had to play with termcap entries, escape sequences etc. I suppose that many of your younger followers were somewhat puzzled by all the techspeak, but to me, it brought back fond memories.

I remember back in the day, I used to work with serial communication all the time on AIX and HP, System V and HP-UX. I also did a lot of CNC machines in shops. I was the serial master. I remember one tech had been at a customer for a week trying to get a Fiber Serial MUX working on a AIX it basically took 16 Serials to dumb terminals over Multimode fiber to another building. Back in the day before IP and Telnet were really a thing. I had it working in about 2hrs. Had to loop 4 and 5 and 6,8.20, set it up for software flow control. I still have my breakout box. Every once in a while it still comes in handy.

I have lots of memories working with old terminals. I had 6502 based terminal in my garage (with colour capability) in mid 1990's. It was connected via serial to PC in house running a Slackware distribution of Linux. Lots of hours spent with termcap, configurations, and trying to get terminal compatibility to present data correctly on the crt.

Great job cleaning that thing man, looks incredible!

How can you get anything done with those two Hydro Thunders in there! Lol

@MileZero313

Жыл бұрын

Lmao so true

Thanks for posting these videos, i really enjoy them.

i really like all the passion that you put through this

Cool video, 6502, 6522 and two 6551 and Linux. Perfetto.

my ibm pc jr had a telecommunications disk with a modem back in 1988

Printer passthrough is what I recall it being called under SCO Unix in the 90s when I first knew about the terminals having addressable printers attached.

back in the 70's and 80's we used to say that RS232 was just another name for Murphy's Law

I used a Sherry Univac monitor with the S100 machine I wire wrapped in 1978. I later got a Televideo monitor and loved it.

That keyboard sounds amazing!

I've been trying to do this exact same thing with my Televideo 950 and ran into these same issues and gave up! Thank you so much!

the snap folder in your home folder gave me shivers..

I like how it makes a Pong type beep when you type.

I used to know a lot of tty commands to get the terminal I was in front of to behave. Often needed even though settings were 'correct'. Typed them in without needing to think. Those were the days. But what was most impressive was IBM block-mode terminals (e.g. 3270) used on the mainframes. Made data entry and data entry programming so easy.

This was in my recommendations and was actually spot on. Subbed and rung.

This is gorgeous! I can't say for sure, but I think that I programmed C for the first time on a TV950 @ UCLA in the PIC (Programming In Computing?!?!) class back in 1985. It was definitely the classic green on black screen. It was attached to a Unix server. Parking was free after 9 PM, so I would drive in and program late into the night. Hmmmm, I guess nothing has really changed, :) . I am sooooo happy you made this video. Even if it's not the exact model I used, it's one of its brethren and deserves to be cherished.

Back in High School all I wanted was a Digital VT100 and a CPM system. Good times.

Nice terminal, although not being VT100 is a problem these days. I've been looking for a terminal for ages, nothing in my neck of the woods. Serial is not that hard, you just have to get used to what DTE & DCE is all about, and how it was used back then, although I have a bit of an advantage, spending my early working years at a telco fixing terminals & modems.

@rommix0

Жыл бұрын

> although not being VT100 is a problem these days. Anything not based on DEC terminals would be an issue. That's for sure.

@GBS1043

Жыл бұрын

Wish I had a dollar for every VT100 I installed

@deang5622

Жыл бұрын

DCE and DTE is simply terminology for each end of the serial link. It'a the control lines you need to get your head around and which particular ones are being used. For example, CTS, RTS. Or DTR, DSR. It's identifying which flow control mechanism is in use and which signal lines and how they behave.

@paulstubbs7678

Жыл бұрын

@@deang5622 Yes that can be a real challenge, as these lines kind of get repurposed, and referring to older documentation on serial can lead you astray as the modern use quite often treats them as general purpose I/O lines, the only bit relevant sometimes is whether they are inputs or outputs.

"Hello, Professor Falkien" - Man I love this feeling!!

thank you! it immersed me in 1980s, totally (like, reliving the past).

i like the look of the keyboard they a good bit of room in the terminal good accesses 😀

Lovely video. Thanks!

I love your channel, because I used some of the old kit you so diligently restore. Now a days who under 30 understands hardware flow control?!

Memories on having a parade of serial adapters plugged into each other. How many times I used to do that, when trying to connect two "standard" technologies to each other (haha).

@c1ph3rpunk

Жыл бұрын

There were standards, problem is they’re mostly telecom and MIS folks generally ignored anything “those phone people” did. When you have a terminal connected to a modem, that dialed into the host, the path makes sense.

Exceptional video!! Thank you!

The first PC barn find revival on youtube! Someone call Junkyard Digs!

16:59 “I wish more keyboards had the option to random beep” *Lenovo has entered the chat*

Control-H is the "escape code" that does delete. If your terminal isn't mapped properly. That usually works

@JdeBP

Жыл бұрын

One really cannot call something an "escape code" if there's no ESC in it. It is a _control character_ . (-:

Very nice video, bringing back memories of my student days in the 90s when I got a TeleVideo TVI925 for a chocolate bar. Attached it to my 486 box running Debian (1.3.1 and later 2.0) with a 9/25 adapter and a 9-pin nullmodem cable. I recall enabling agetty /dev/ttyS1 in /etc/inittab, and that was pretty much all I needed. The terminfo file supported tvi925, and I did not run screen here. Well, the serial terminal was meant to serve as a fallback when screwing up XFree86 configs, but I actually never needed it.

These are my favourite type of video you make 👍🏻

If you give a museum relic to this careless guy he'll tear it to pieces in two hours.

Interesting to see this. Back in the 80s i did a lot of typing on the keyboards of Televideo 910 & 925 terminals. Never saw a 950.

A childhool dream just came true lol. Thanks for taking the time to make this video happen (even if it IS massively impractical); I agree it's super cool to have a dumb terminal you can use in the modern age. I still hope one day to find and setup a last generation VAX dumb terminal, I first encountered those as a short term "intern" at Pilkingtons Glass and they inspired me (smooth scrolling and basic windowing in a terminal! Crazy good).

Shelby always does cool projects

I have a Televideo 905 that I still use on a daily basis on my linux system! Televideo terminals are definitely built to last!

HEY.. used those terminals at college.. Forget the name of the Unix (it was AT&T licensed), but called Prime something, think it has S-100 bus. Used for teaching classes how to write/compile C and Fortran programs, and has some SQL (think it was Postgresql) on it. Brings back memories.

Man I remember using screen when running an ISP (using modems) in the 90's. Fun times.

Vintge terminals and modern Linux/BSD are always fun, yours seems to be very usable for 1980 vintage. I've successfully tried to connect old 70s Tektronix 4006 vector terminal to my desktop and it kinda worked, there are luckily still few tools that can plot in the Tek format, but biggest problem usability wise is the lack of lowercase keys.

Gotta respect youtubers who pull out a fire extinguisher and prominently display it in their video right before turning something on.

I remember using the TeleVideo terminals along with the CP/M system they had.

Well done! I was doing my job on TERM=pf and vt100. Many odd reactions when set to the wrong one in .profile. I used UNIX System V on a Perkin-Elmer 3210 minicomputer, which had 9 terminals, a console, 1 line printer, 1 plotter and an 8" double floppy disk station. The hard drive had one permanent and one removable spindle, each holding 16MB of data. The RAM had about 4 MB. A program, written in C, only i++ing up to 100K on a longint took only ONE second to run. ---=== This was one year before 1984 ===--- Greetings to all of you ...

I am looking at my alacritty, tmux and gazillion of tools and hacks that I use to make it all comfortable and fast and actually irreplaceable with even more appreciation now, thanks! :)

the widzard incantation for setting your 'back space' key is: "stty erase " also when you set your TERM you should export it. e.g. $ export TERM=tvi-950

AHHH the sound of a dot matrix printer .... memories 🙂

I bought a televideo 950 in my university sophomore year in 1983 along with a hayes modem, game changer for me so I did not have to goto the computer center to work on by CS degree. My first years on BSD unix on a vax….

Back in the day, we had a customer that ran a scrap metal business. Every time we went there, the terminals looked just as dirty as the one you found in the barn. We would clean everything (including on one occasion cleaning a huge number of ants out of the main Altos Unix system), and get it all looking pretty again, only to have to repeat the process a few months later. We used to use a foaming cleaner called Amberclens Anti-Static Foaming Cleaner (which still exists). It came in an aerosol can, and would clean anything off anything. I have no idea what the hazmat sheet looks like for the stuff, but is sure as heck does the trick.

@thenathanhaines

11 ай бұрын

Anthill Inside!

I loved the televideo. I wrote a bbs for amiga that supported those and the vt100's

I had one of those (next to a lot of other terminals) for years on my many serial only systems. I actually wanted a 955, and all I got was this 950 and 920C. Bought them from school. I used to work on school on these. 96 people working at the same time on the same computer with 2MB ram, which was a lot. Doing "excel" and stuff. Never was a problem.

Back in 2004 one of my clients had an old SCO Unix server with 16 dumb terminals connected via serial cable, in offices on a 2 story building. The clerks worked on a lot of medical data entry and a terminal was all they needed. My job was to convert all the stations to Windows XP with a telnet client instead. the funny thing is those clerks hated XP; they wanted their old dumb terminals back. They really could input a lot of data with those old terminals.

Those Televideo 950's were awesome terminals back in the day. Then Wyse finally one-upped them just as character terminals were on the way out.

What an awesome trip down memory lane. Thanks for sharing this! If you ever want to sell one of those terminals, let me know! I'm in the market for a vintage terminal. I would love that retro-computing vibe when working on the Linux command line!

Try typing stty erase That usually works for me.

When you opened it up. TBH it didn't look too bad. Sure there was a lot of dust and dirt. But there didn't seem to be any corrosion which would be my biggest worry with a piece of equpment kept in less than Ideal conditions.

I have used an Atari ST with VT100 cartridge and Linux for IRC. Lot of fun.

I'm pretty convinced, that you can avoid agetty completely and use screen directly, as it accepts tty-devices as inputs just like `screen /dev/ttyUSB0` (plus terminal-mode options of course). I always use it like this when using serial-output from microcontrollers and such. beside that, you can configure screen to not show it's start-screen, that you have to bypass by pressing enter (which is default on only some distros).

You can tell that _some_ of the keys are the color of the main part of the keyboard's case, but then even the ones that are black have so much of that tan dust on them that even _they_ look _almost_ that same beige color, haha!

The best times when companies outright told you to take it apart and check everything

@Okurka.

Жыл бұрын

Best times? You want to take apart your new smartphone and check everything before you can use it?

@oliverer3

Жыл бұрын

​@@Okurka. If it wasn't glued together and it voided the warranty I'd totally do this xD

@Okurka.

Жыл бұрын

@@oliverer3 Opening a device doesn't void the warranty.

Printing was great. I could escape out of my libraries card catalog, telnet into school, and properly print documents vs try and 0rint serene multiple times and get it all out of alignment

As I remember. Printing on Unix is simple. You send a command to the terminal (^P in general) and it instructs the terminal to forward everything it receives in serial port, to printer port. ^N ends this behavior and resumes the normal operation. Then. The wen you print a file, rh spool program formats the output and sends it to a script indicating the destination printer. This script knows that this printer is attached to some terminal and knows it's serial port. So it sends ^P to this serial port followed by the print data and a ^N. This means you can send print jobs to any slave printer on any terminal. The only problem is that during the print the screen is frozen.

So, while it's always a good idea to have TERM set correctly, some software out there doesn't actually use the terminfo library, and just has DEC VT escape sequences hard-coded. (I looked into the neofetch source, and it falls ito the hard-coded category. It looks like something in bash has an xterm escape sequence hard-coded, too, which turns an xterm feature called "bracketed paste mode" on.) Unfortunately, it's been a long time since it was mainstream to use anything but a DEC VT or an emulation of it. And personally... I don't really miss the days of terminal ecosystem diversity. Or the fun of maintaining code that has to work on a dozen different Unix flavours. Or the wide variety of microprocessors and hardware platforms. Most of the time, anyway. 😺

Looks cool AF, reminds me of the PCs from Alien (1979)

To change the back space character try using stty erase. Hopefully the commands for clear, vi and Emacs should work perfect as these will make use of the term variable, make sure display is unset. I did not use this model but the 925 with a Spiderport that used to connect to both Sun OS and Primos systems when I was studying. Obviously I preferred the Prime Pt220 and Dec Vt320 and vt340 terminals to this one. If you even need to connect to the Serial port of an old Sun system the default is 9600, 7 bits, even parity with xon/xoff and if connected to the console do not press the break key if you have one as that will bring up the open boot or old mode prompts depending on the setting

Back then, when you were missing an adapter, sometimes you were able to string 3 others together to arrive at the same result. 😂

Yo Shelby's working on a secret Atari Project! :0

good show, bro. keep it up.

This is straight out of Fallout and I love it.

@mariolis

10 ай бұрын

More like fallout was straight out of it but i know what you mean ... that was my first interaction with a "terminal computer* as well