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Integrating a VT220 into my life
- ayuvar 11y agoI wanted to do this, but used VTs are pretty expensive (mostly the cost of shipping). I do have an old French Minitel terminal, though - anyone know what the protocol for those is like?
- mrbill 11y agoEasy: http://serverfault.com/questions/176822/how-do-i-use-a-minitel-terminal-as-a-linux-dumb-terminal http://serverfault.com/questions/176822/how-do-i-use-a-minit... With a RPi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5CltdZktlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5CltdZktlw
- mrbill 11y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/2h8ich/minitel_1_as_an_linux_serial_console_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/2h8ich...
- mrbill 11y agoI feel old; I used a Wyse 320 and later a VT220 as my sole / main IO device in 1995-96 - connected to a SPARCstation 10 via a multi-port serial box at 9600 baud, with heavy use of GNU Screen. Even now, I still use a variation on that - a tall terminal window, ssh, and screen - for the majority of my work.
- vt240 11y agoI really liked the Wyse 320? and used it for years until CRT died. It seemed to have the most diverse emulation support. Same deal with vt320 and HP 700/96 I just got tried of working on the CRTs all the time. Now I just use ZOC.
- protomyth 11y agoWell, I've used the Z19, IBM 5150, and VT 220 & 240 in my early years, so your among other late 80s / early 90s terminal room dwellers. I still have a green screen terminal configure on my Mac. Although, I have switched to yellow text / red background for production and blue background for test environments. Keeps one from doing really stupid things.
- technofiend 11y agoLOL. What's old is new again, mate. When I worked at Shell in 1989 and 1990 we were going to throw out Sun 3 desktops as underpowered and useless. Instead I convinced them to recycle the 3/50s and 3/60s as X terminals by replacing init and booting straight into X. You could use local X terms and telnet (ssh? what's that?) to systems, but we found it was faster to use XDM and supply the desktop from a server like a Sun 4/280. I would kill to have a modern-day equivalent of the native UNIX desktop I had on a 4/110 after we ditched the 3/50's: the system had two frame buffers and you could switch between desktops by crossing the desktop boundary in any direction. Probably easier to just use two screens these days but at the time that meant putting two extremely large and deep CRTs on your desk. Here we are 25 years later and xterm+ssh is still the easiest way to get my UNIX work done even if everything else (e-mail, productivity apps) is in Windows. Where's my modern-day NCD X terminal equivalent and unix desktop?
- jamescun 11y agoI was discussing an identical project with a coworker a while back, and have been stalking ebay for VT2X0s occasionally since. However they seem to be incredibly rare in the UK, and all the listings shown require shipping from the US with monstrous fees. Although my idea was not necessarily integration in to my work flow, more a dashboard of network/server stats etc.
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoAuthor here. I got the pictured one refurbished through vecmar.com, and I just bought a second one on eBay (for use at home).
- vmorgulis 11y agoVery cool post :) The VT220 supports Sixels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel I wonder if PySixel would work on real hardware: https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel HN thread about libsixel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340367
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoThat's pretty cool! It reminds me of a similar project I did called z80e, which is an emulator for TI calculators [0]. It uses unicode braille to "render" the screen onto a terminal. Doesn't work on the VT220, though, for obvious reasons. [0] https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e
- vmorgulis 11y agoFascinating! I'm reading the source code of z80e (tui.c). Your idea of using unicode to display pixels is very interesting. I imagine a fallback mode for libsixel for terminals not sixel-compatible (or the opposite). I try ton compile but it fails (first because scas was missing and now I have an "a2x: not found" in scas). I appreciate a lot the "multitarget rendering" (emscripten, tui, sdl...).
- shmerl 11y agoOr you could just run cool-retro-term[1] for the similar visual effect. [1]: https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
- mark-r 11y agoThose examples all seem to have excessive bleed from the bright areas. If those were physical devices, I'd be turning down the brightness control immediately. Anybody come up with a version for iOS or Android yet? Seeing it on a tablet would be a real juxtaposition.
- frou_dh 11y agoiOS (and Mac) has Cathode: http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/ I recall finding the rendering impressive when playing around with the Mac version.
- shmerl 11y agoIt has various color and brightness controls, so you can adjust it.
- ricksplat 11y agoIs there a windows one?
- mrbill 11y agoI can't remember the exact model number, but a company sold gas-plasma-discharge orange-on-black compact "flat panel" VT220 clones years ago. I owned one for a while before selling it off (along with a 19" gas plasma flat panel for a MicroVAX that I got at Goodwill for $25 - now THAT was a steal that I turned into a nice profit!).
- mikestew 11y agoHmm, seem to recall Wyse had a gas-plasma display. The Googles do nothing to turn up a model #, though. Several vendors made them, with Wyse being the more popular brand IIRC, and early Toshiba laptops used them (had a 386 with a gas-plasma display).
- mrbill 11y agoHah! Found my own email post in an google search. Planar ELT320 http://www.sunhelp.org/pipermail/sunhelp/2004-January/019825.html http://www.sunhelp.org/pipermail/sunhelp/2004-January/019825...
- darklajid 11y agoLooking at that workspace I just need - another large monitor - my MTG cards collection back - at least four magic cubes - a nerf gun and ... a VT220. At least I got that very same keyboard already. Seriously, that looks like a really nice working space, completely ignoring the fact that I just learned about sway (I'm on i3 here) in the process.
- displague 11y agoYou would also need a vial of Uranium Ore. http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=2_4&products_id=782 http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cP...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- DKnoll 11y agoIf there is a ping pong table, rubix cubes just start mysteriously spawning around the office.
- hudibras 11y agoAnd a Minecraft mousepad.
- rafaelbeirigo 11y agoThat is what one could call Nice (R). :)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tacostakohashi 11y agoI had a Wyse dumb terminal attached to my main Linux workstation for a few years in the late 90s, back when such things were fairly easy to pick up for free. Its not to be sneezed at for doing serious programming work. The green on black, text only CRT was super high contrast (especially compared to any modern LCD), and the complete lack of distractions that come with a multitasking desktop environment (email notifications, chat, web browsers, Facebook, etc) mean that it's productive for serious work, and pretty much only serious work. I'd happily do this again if I could get them for free, but paying shipping seems a bit much.
- tgflynn 11y agoIs the contrast on an old CRT really better than on a modern LCD screen ? I find that a bit hard to believe but I certainly don't have any way to check. You could run a plain vanilla window manager with a single xterm if you want to avoid distractions.
- dsr_ 11y agoIt depends. You can crank up the brightness much higher on a CRT, and so you can get better contrast in a sunny room. In a dark room, any decent LCD and any half-decent CRT can get the characters uncomfortably bright. But it's only 80x25! I may have read megabytes of email and Usenet on such things, but I always lusted over the big displays of the Suns that could fit 40 rows down, and change character size to match my desires. So I'm all for adding more screen real estate, but a VT220 isn't my pick for best way to do that. I prefer a second large monitor in portrait mode.
- tacostakohashi 11y agoSure, CRTs have better contrast than LCDs in general, but monochrome CRTs have incredible contrast. I guess it's because they don't have separate red / green / blue subpixels (2/3rds of which would be off for green on a color CRT). Also, the particular shade of green phosphor they use is really intense, I guess they just use the wavelength the eye is most sensitive too, because they don't care about how it mixes with other colors.
- sklogic 11y agoI want my VT50 back. 80x11, capitals only, and cool mechanical keys.
- aap_ 11y agoThe VT50 looks so awesome. But I'm afraid they are rare as hell :( At least I have a VT100 clone (CIT-101)...
- tacon 11y agoI spent many allnighters on a Datapoint 3300 with TECO as the editor in the early '70s. http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-computers/7/178/717 http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-computer...
- julian55 11y agoI used to use a VT52 and TECO, later replaced by a VT100. The smooth scrolling seemed impressive at the time. Not long after that I moved into embedded software and wrote firmware to emulate these terminals, mostly in Z80 assembler.
- pippy 11y agoI have a VT220, and it's pretty cool apart from the high pitched whining sound it makes. I think I might have to recap it at some point
- Gracana 11y agoI also have a VT on my desk. Mine's a Wyse 55. https://i.imgur.com/ke9Fypp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ke9Fypp.jpg I don't really use it for editing code, I just needed to put something on the screen that wasn't email or irc (which would reveal semi-sensitive information.)
- paulmd 11y agoQuasi-related: I've always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they're not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power. So far the easiest approach I've found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into another system, which I think is a sensible access mode. Ideally, something like the AVR PicoPower microcontrollers would be fantastic - they run on ultra-low-voltage, eat 1 mA/MIPS, and idle down to basically nothing (<1ma active and a few dozen microamps during sleep). ssh is probably out of the question but I could toss a VT100 stack on it. Unfortunately the eInk display is the hard part there - most eInk parts have very poor documentation.
- creshal 11y agoI'd really love to have one or five of those for maintenance work. There's a lot of devices that I don't really need to have a keyboard and video connected to for 99.99% of their life time, but I still need an LC display and KVM switch connected to for about 10 minutes per decade. It's such a waste.
- Syrup-tan 11y agoEuhh, I'm not sure I understand your use-case, but e-ink displays aren't especially "cheap", or such. They take a noticeable amount of time to update the display, so doing things like typing, or viewing output from top(1) would be less than ideal. (This seems to get better with firmware, and being "smart" about which places of the screen get updated, generally) The appeal, at least to me, is that they can display information with little energy cost. For example you could have it monitor the system's health and have it update every half an hour, showing graphs and such, and it would be able to do that for a very long time with a smallish battery.
- grahamburger 11y agoI feel like I'm missing something - why do you need it to run on battery if it's consistently monitoring a specific machine? Isn't their power pretty much anywhere you'd need something like this?
- threeio 11y agoI've had a handful of these over the years, initially in my home racks and workstation, later migrating to my datacenter so I had an always on stats screen showing traffic, alerts, etc. +1 for good tmux'ing your output.
- Bud 11y agoI've still got an old vt100. Last time I used it, it was still working, although admittedly, that was in the early 2000s. :)
- kyberias 11y agoLucky you. I also had a working VT100 some years ago. It's a nice device but rather huge. Still I hope to have it back. It was nice to see those monsters in The Big Short.
- KiDD 11y agoWhats in the vial?
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y agoUranium ore samples.
- hga 11y agoThe Ann Arbor Ambassador was the ne plus ultra at the end of that age, it did up to 60 lines of 80 characters, had the fancy features to minimize data transfer, and could do it all at 9600 baud. The VT220 was a nice evolution of the clunky VT100, but there wasn't a vast difference from, say, the VT52 to it, besides the extra commands that allowed minimizing data transfer (at the cost of rather hairy redisplay code).
- smoyer 11y agoI recycled a couple of nice Hazeltine terminals about eight years ago ... About three years ago I was wishing that I had them back. Projects like this as well as their use (with a serial multiplexer) as the console for a rack of servers remind me of the good old days.
- AceJohnny2 11y agoThe VT220 is fascinating as an example of "old" computer technology that still influences the devices we use on a daily basis. I've recently had to understand exactly which control characters are sent between the app and the terminal (emulator) for delete and backspace. Guess which ASCII control characters is sent by the Backspace key on your PC keyboard? ASCII DEL (0x7F/^?)! All modern terminal emulators on Linux and OS X (including the Linux console, xterm and libvte-based terminals, OS X Terminal.app and iTerm2) now default to sending DEL [1] when you press the Backspace key... now it makes much more sense that on a Mac keyboard, that key is labeled "Delete" and used to have the same symbol as on the VT220! Oh, and what character is sent when you press the (forward) Delete key? Why, the escape sequence 1B 5B 33 7E (ESC [ 3 ~), of course :) Because the terminals we emulate didn't have a key for forward delete ;) For bonus credit, lookup the historical usage of the Linefeed (LF/0xA/^J) and CarriageReturn (CR/0xD/^M) characters [2]. There was much more than just the Unix/Mac/Windows divide in text files... [1] yes, you can swap for ASCII BS (8/^H), but if your app needs that, consider updating it. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Representations
- technofiend 11y agoSame with H, J, K, L in VI because of the ADM 3A's escape sequences emitted when using that terminal's arrow keys.
- mrpippy 11y agoI picked up a VT220 a year ago at an estate sale, the previous owner was using it with amateur radio gear. Prices (especially including shipping) seem prohibitively expensive otherwise!
- rcarmo 11y agoWow. I used VT220s and 230s in college, and remember those days fondly (they were hooked up to VAXen, and there was nothing quite like it, really). I wonder if I could get a keyboard and enclosure someplace and bolt on an LCD panel from a netbook (if only for the sake of power consumption).
- ChuckMcM 11y agoI've long since given away or sold most of my old DEC terminals, I've still got a couple (VT340, VT340+, VT220 x 2) but the keyboards don't hold up. I'm down to two working keyboards (an LK201 and an LK401). I've been tempted to wire up a HID -> VTxx adapter using a simple embedded controller. I'll have to add that to my list of fun projects for a long weekend. Generally though when using them on older machines I am amazed at how frustrating 80 columns of 24 (or 25) lines can be! Sure you can do "wide" mode and get 132 columns but still, the desire to see more screen real estate is a constant issue.
- dekhn 11y agoI bought an apple IIe for nostalgia and one of the first things I did was hook up a null modem cable to the serial card and make it a linux terminal. I was able to use google via elinks. My kids love the various games like ultima because it's like minecraft (blocky) but you can't build in it.
- sedatk 11y agoI can't help but think about waste of power and radiation of CRT. Green movement poisoned us for life.
- wtbob 11y agoHonestly, were it not for a web browser I really wouldn't need a GUI at all: everything else I do is a terminal and emacs (sure, both are running in X, but I don't really use their GUI features for much). I remember when I was a kid with access to a local university's systems, and the only way to do anything was with dumb terminals. I telnetted to MUDs, FTPed software, read Usenet — in a lot of ways those dumb terminals were smarter than my current computer. Sure, I can still do all that, but the magic is gone.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoWe even had a space invaders - ran on vt52s up. Played quite nicely unless there was a bit of latency and the animations went weird. No one would let us near the hyper-expensive VAX with huge (21"?) vector monitor and light pen terminals. We'd have tried to make asteroids of course :)
- Keyframe 11y agoI used VT320 (amber) "back in the day" a lot. I wish I could find one to hook up to my workstation or an SGI Octane2 (for full retro feeling to it). I would only write text/screenplays on it anyways. Something about CRTs that modern monitors haven't captured.
- johnohara 11y agoThese things continue to show up in the weirdest places as never-intended consoles. Phone switches, network devices, control panels, etc. There were so many of them leftover from the switch to PC's and they always seemed to work (once you got the parity right). Usually in some closet somewhere, balanced on top of a box with the keyboard leaning against the wall. Need a power cable? Grab one from a PC, use it to power up, change some settings, turn it off and put the cable back. Thank you Ken Olsen.
- salgernon 11y agoAt work, I have a Wyse 50 tailing my console log. It's actually really useful to be able to debug stuff when something goes awry on my development machine. For fun at home I have an ADDS Regent 25 with a raspberry pi inside. Turn it on, it boots to Debian and binds to the network. I force the kids to play 'snake' on it when I'm sick of them using iPads. In my home "office" I've got my VT102 tied to a PDP/8 simulator on a pi, with one of these kit front panels: http://obsolescence.wix.com/obsolescence#!pidp-8/cbie (Those were before my time, although I remember playing ADVENT on one (or a DEC 10?)
- Corrado 11y agoDarn, I just got rid of a VT420 that I had kept for years. That would have been a really cool (geeky) project. :(
- Jaruzel 11y agoI used mostly VT420s in my old VAX sysadmin days - I always preferred the white text on black ones. Nice thing about VT420s was the split screen dual serial port mode.
- theglu 11y agoFor our next LAN party this week, we did a small player interface to welcome users using VT220. Here is it working with an acoustic coupler throught a field phone: https://vimeo.com/159678785 https://vimeo.com/159678785 :)
- yankcrime 11y agoFrom a couple of years back, an article on using a VT220 with OS X: http://jstn.cc/post/8692501831 http://jstn.cc/post/8692501831