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Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal [video]
- knowaveragejoe 6y agoWonderful youtube channel! I recommend it to anyone interested in retro hardware, in particular hardware reverse engineering.
- herpderperator 6y agoThis is super cool, but the fact that it only prints uppercase characters would be a nightmare if a standard case-sensitive filesystem is used.
- kps 6y agoThat's why `stty lcase` exists.
- rbanffy 6y agoModel 33's also didn't have lowercase. It was not that common in terminals until the early 70's at least. The DEC VT05, for instance, didn't have lowercase.
- dboreham 6y agoIf we're playing competitive nostalgia, I owned (and used) a 5-channel teletype (electromechanical, lots of oil). Not having lower case would have been sheer luxury. Interesting perspective when you realize you're looking at a UART implemented in tin.
- rbanffy 6y agoIf we are competing, you win. I briefly used a 33 (as a peripheral to a CNC training computer) and I still miss that cadenced hum.
- JdeBP 6y agoThis would not have wholly worked with Linux. As I've noted elsewhere in this discussion, Linux does not support all of the Unix mechanisms. It does not implement the XCASE line discipline flag; so, unlike on Unix, on Linux one cannot use the xcase mechanism to get lowercase on an uppercase-only terminal. FreeBSD doesn't support the Unix mechanism, either. Nor does NetBSD. Xe could have connected it to an OpenBSD system. OpenBSD still supports the whole mechanism. * https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/57d747eef2b80ca9ffb95407c05cf5e668ba72d6/sys/kern/tty.c#L407 https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/57d747eef2b80ca9ffb95407...
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoThis is why you use HFS and a language like Common Lisp that is case insensitive.
- jv22222 6y agoFinally, existence proof for all those Hollywood movies where the hero macgyvers a vacuum cleaner and a radio into a multi dimensional portal. I mean, it proves you can upvert old stuff anyways ;)
- hexadec 6y agoHacker voice "I'm in" and the telex sounds off in the background. It is interesting how you can track the history of remote terminals and make them work at all. It shows the true value of clear documentation.
- Animats 6y agoYes, it does. Those machines are very well documented. Here are the manuals: http://aetherltd.com/manuals.html http://aetherltd.com/manuals.html
- Ericson2314 6y agoAh.... back when we documented things.
- rbanffy 6y agoImagine not having to rewrite all the docs every six months...
- derefr 6y agoHas anyone ever tried building one of these from scratch just from the manuals? That sounds like it'd be a fun joint EE + machining project.
- vanderZwan 6y ago> Hacker voice "I'm in" and the telex sounds off in the background. In the video it's the other way around: he logs in from the teletype around the ten minute mark. So I guess that kind of "proves" that a time-traveling dieselpunk hacker genius should be able to do the same ;)
- earthboundkid 6y agoIn college, I wanted to buy a vterm for connecting to my laptop and being cool, but I couldn’t find one on eBay for college student prices.
- Animats 6y agoModel 15 machines have such a long life. I've restored two of those, plus three Model 14 machines, an earlier 1920s design. My machines have been to about a dozen steampunk conventions.[1] People send in their messages by texting, and they're printed on the Model 15, then delivered by a messenger. The video shows two acting students running our steampunk telegraph office. They're great at it. Web site: [2] For smaller conventions, we have a semi-portable, a Model 14 tape printer in a road case made to fit. The tape is pasted down on telegram blanks, just like real telegrams up to the mid-1950s. I normally run these off EeePC subnotebooks that run XUbuntu Linux. Those subnotebooks are about $30 on eBay, so I bought some of them for small projects. It's like having a Raspberry PI with a keyboard, screen, battery, and power supply all in a convenient clamshell case. I could run them as a Linux terminal, but I usually run them with a Python program that performs the telegraph office functions. The lack of lower case is less of a problem in this application than the lack of emoji. I put the entire dictionary of emoji names into the program, and it spells out the emoji as (happy face), etc. That's amused some people who sent emoji-heavy messages. The Right To Repair people would love those machines. Every part is individually replaceable. The price of this is a huge number of adjustments, plus annual oiling and cleaning. Few people today would put up with that much periodic maintenance in an office machine. It does let them be restored a century after they were built. [1] https://vimeo.com/124065314 https://vimeo.com/124065314 [2] http://www.aether.ltd http://www.aether.ltd
- Aloha 6y agoThat's the thing about tech of that era, a moderately equipped machine shop can build almost any of it. If there was a big crisis, We could retreat back to 1930 level of technology with relative ease in fact, maybe even later. That gives us radio, telephones, telegraphy, et al. All that tech can be made in small workshops.
- derefr 6y agoThat's, to me, the amazing thing about machining: pretty much any invention from the dawn of civilization up until the vacuum tube can be made in "a moderately equipped machine shop." Because, if a part requires a custom tool to build, it's very likely there's a version of that tool you can build with just the same 1930s tech you use to build anything else, in about four hours. A good chunk of hobbyist-machinist YouTube is essentially just people bootstrapping themselves into a complete shop's worth of tools starting from three or four primitives, and it's kind of wonderful to watch. (I'm always kind of disappointed whenever one of these hobbyist folks get a CNC mill or something, because it throws off that bootstrapping feeling. I know it was never their goal, but they were coincidentally pulling it off until that point.)
- harrygeez 6y agoThis is glorious. I'd love to have one of this at home, just for the novelty
- donaldihunter 6y agoIdeal for SMS. The Steampunk Message Service.
- lordleft 6y agoAmazing video. A lot of the quirks of UNIX and editors like vi make way more sense when you become aware of the role of the teletype in early computing.
- dboreham 6y agoEditors like ed. Vi was waaayyy post teletype.
- JdeBP 6y agoIt is a shame that there are no @ or #, otherwise xe could have demonstrated why the old defaults for the line discipline's special characters were as they were. I notice that xe did not attempt to manually turn the iulcl or olcuc line discipline flags on with stty. Linux does not actually support xcase, though, not that there is a backslash anyway. (-:
- lqet 6y agoNext step: Using a a Linotype [0] as a Linux terminal :) I would love to have my terminal output cast in lead! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
- rini17 6y agoOr as output for web engine. To drive home the phrase "Reflows are expensive".
- donaldihunter 6y agoThis reminds me of the Model 33 [1] we had connected up to a ZX Spectrum [2], back when I was a kid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Interface_1
- kbr2000 6y agoCool! Made a "light" attempt at this when I was a kid, hooking up a matrix printer to my MSX computer [0], and learning BASIC's PEEK and POKE from my dad, to make a kind of typewriter: type a character, it prints at the curpos and advances the printhead; backspace moved the head one place back; return advances the page one line. Lots of fun :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
- IIAOPSW 6y agoSo I currently have some Google cloud credits for a very computationally intense project. I have a 160 core VM with Debian on it and every time I start up the terminal it blows my mind that this blinking little cursor costs ~$17k per month (if I left it on). For the sake of achieving ludicrous anachronism, I now want to hook this machine up to the teletype.
- type0 6y agoGreat hands on Ed demonstration, not that you would need an actual tty for that but it puts things in perspective.
- WhyNotHugo 6y agoThis is beautiful.
- non-entity 6y agoAwesome! These are the the type of projects I want to so, but am limited by my electronics ability.
- kbr2000 6y agoWell, good luck! Remember it's never too late to learn something ;)
- ddevault 6y agoThis is amazing! I'm very jealous. I've wanted to get ahold of these to do the very same thing for a long, long time. I made do with a cheap hack instead: https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/10/30/Line-printer-shell-hack.h...
- woodrowbarlow 6y agojsyk, it looks like spacepub.space has an expired certificate, so your embedded video on that page isn't loading.
- ddevault 6y agoThanks, I noticed that too. I'm transcoding the longer video to rehost it myself.
- tpmx 6y agoHow is the decoding logic implemented inside these machines? Any informative websites?
- lokedhs 6y agoHe has this playlist on the same channel where they restore the Model 19, and they explain in detail how the decoder works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NuvwndwYSY&list=PL-_93BVApb5-9eQLTCk9xx16RAGEYHH1q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NuvwndwYSY&list=PL-_93BVApb...
- phreeza 6y agoFascinating to think that Unix is older than this teletype was at the inception of Unix...