6 ms·

For some reason this font looks much better to me in the cool-retro-term screenshot compared to the modern terminals but I can't explain why. Does the spacing s

For some reason this font looks much better to me in the cool-retro-term screenshot compared to the modern terminals but I can't explain why. Does the spacing somehow seem less wide on a CRT monitor?

systemvoltage 6y ago
It's the aliasing. Phosphor displays "smooth" out the text whereas we've spend better part of the last 30 years trying to interpolate pixels to achieve the same. See font hinting - it is a rabbit hole. If you've never used a terminal before, one of those CRT amber displays, you're definitely missing out. It's a sight to behold. Not just visually, but also how instantaneous keyboard strokes appear on the screen. It will make you despise the current technology stack, operating systems and pretty much any user interface whilst you've just had the best minute and half of your life pressing keys...with a giant smile on your face. It is experiential thing - the current generation will never know or experience.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  I distinctly remember when the local library started phasing in web-based terminals to replace text-based card catalog terminals. Early 2000s, it must have been? Slow as molasses, hard on the eyes, (Remember when every dang institutional CRT would be set to a flickery 60hz, with no way to fix it?) gummy rubber-dome keyboards on Wintel machines, but by god it was web-based, which was the Future. (Oh how right they were...) Anyone with a web browser at home could visit it, without having to bust out telnet! I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    I share your sadness and I emphathize. There are so many things like this that I worry, will be lost in the oblivion of time, and erased forever. I think cliche of romanticizing old ways of doing things is totally uncalled for. People don't romanticize about bad things from the old days. They pick the best ones that survived memories and thus talk about it to provide guidance for the future. We should listen to them.
  - exmadscientist 6y ago
    I wish I'd paid more attention to the details of how things were back then, to the glowing amber VT220s and Laser 128s. It didn't seem important... why would the future be worse, not better? And yet, somehow we're here....
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  If someone (you?) has written up how to recreate this experience, please share it. I know that there are scheduling options in Linux to improve latency. I know that some keyboard brands respond faster than others. A subset of these will have pleasing mechanical keys. A good display is obviously a must, but do they too suffer from having a wife range of performance problems? It would be gratefully received.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    It’s not that foreign to experience things like this. Just flip a switch with an LED or Incandescent bulb - notice how instantaneous it reacts to the switch action. Then do the same with fluorescent bulb with a ballast. The world is full of instantly reacting stuff. From writing to playing ping pong, we expect a certain amount of latency and no more. That’s why soft suspension cars are not fun (even if their performance was great, it’s not) because so much of driving pleasure comes from the tactility and Human-to-Machine interaction - basically brain seeks faster feedback so the control loop is tight. :) Enjoy the physical world. It’s amazing.
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      > "That’s why soft suspension cars are not fun (even if their performance was great, it’s not) because so much of driving pleasure comes from the tactility and Human-to-Machine interaction - basically brain seeks faster feedback so the control loop is tight." As with anything in the physical world, it is a lot more complicated than that :-) I know most people and certainly most car enthusiasts think you need stiff suspension and wide low-profile tires to have the most fun driving, but that's not necessarily true. For the fastest times around a track, you obviously need as much grip as you can possibly get, and you can run very very stiff suspension because of the flat and even surface. You probably also want a dual-clutch or F1-style automated gearbox and an intelligent AWD system with complex driver aids, like in the Nissan GT-R. However based on my experience, if you're looking for the most fun driving experience, and not just the best numbers on a score sheet, you need to go in a different direction. What you want is a lightweight car on relatively skinny tires with a decent amount of sidewall, and most importantly a suspension with long travel, softly sprung and stiffly damped. That's the Colin Chapman (of Lotus fame) British sports car approach, which is perfect for real world fun, chucking a nimble and communicative car around empty B-roads in the countryside. The reason for not choosing super wide low-profile tires is that having more sidewall in relation to width lets the tire flex more on the wheel, which lets the entire chassis communicate more. It's true that a low-profile tire will feel more "snappy" or "crisp" and have a higher absolute limit of grip, but it also gives you much less warning when you're approaching the limit than a skinnier and taller tire would. Decreasing the absolute limit of grip and making the margin of error wider lets you play around more, making it easier to get that extremely satisfying four-wheel drift around a fast sweeping corner. By making the car less sharp and crisp, but more communicative, you increase the tactility and driver involvement. It's the difference between grip and handling. A grippy car with just grip and grip and grip, but a car with good handling will tell you what's going on and involve you in the process. All of this is why Toyota/Subaru specified relatively narrow and completely ordinary road tires (Michelin Primacy IIRC) for the GT-86/BRZ sports car, because it's more fun, more of the time.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Those amber and green displays were 80 chars x 24 lines - which is quite a bit less than a modern 5K monitor. They also connected to their host at 1200 baud, or if you were really lucky twice that. (You could go faster if you had an entire mainframe to yourself, but most people didn't.) So while you could edit instantly on the display itself, doing any actual computing required a lot of waiting for the text... to... appear... from... left... to... right... I learned to write software in a room full of VT100s connected to an underpowered DEC KS10, and I have zero nostalgia for the terminal technology of the day.

For some reason this font looks much better to me in the cool-retro-term screenshot compared to the modern terminals but I can't explain why. Does the spacing somehow seem less wide on a CRT monitor?

systemvoltage 6y ago

It's the aliasing. Phosphor displays "smooth" out the text whereas we've spend better part of the last 30 years trying to interpolate pixels to achieve the same. See font hinting - it is a rabbit hole. If you've never used a terminal before, one of those CRT amber displays, you're definitely missing out. It's a sight to behold. Not just visually, but also how instantaneous keyboard strokes appear on the screen. It will make you despise the current technology stack, operating systems and pretty much any user interface whilst you've just had the best minute and half of your life pressing keys...with a giant smile on your face. It is experiential thing - the current generation will never know or experience.

sbierwagen 6y ago
I distinctly remember when the local library started phasing in web-based terminals to replace text-based card catalog terminals. Early 2000s, it must have been? Slow as molasses, hard on the eyes, (Remember when every dang institutional CRT would be set to a flickery 60hz, with no way to fix it?) gummy rubber-dome keyboards on Wintel machines, but by god it was web-based, which was the Future. (Oh how right they were...) Anyone with a web browser at home could visit it, without having to bust out telnet! I stuck with the amber screen terminals, whose commands I had long-since memorized, but their numbers steadily dwindled, dwindled, until there was one left, then none. Forced into the arms of an IE6-era old school form-based web app, no shortcuts, no nothing. The data was all still text, they wouldn't have cover photos for years. Alas.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I share your sadness and I emphathize. There are so many things like this that I worry, will be lost in the oblivion of time, and erased forever. I think cliche of romanticizing old ways of doing things is totally uncalled for. People don't romanticize about bad things from the old days. They pick the best ones that survived memories and thus talk about it to provide guidance for the future. We should listen to them.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  I wish I'd paid more attention to the details of how things were back then, to the glowing amber VT220s and Laser 128s. It didn't seem important... why would the future be worse, not better? And yet, somehow we're here....
gorgoiler 6y ago
If someone (you?) has written up how to recreate this experience, please share it. I know that there are scheduling options in Linux to improve latency. I know that some keyboard brands respond faster than others. A subset of these will have pleasing mechanical keys. A good display is obviously a must, but do they too suffer from having a wife range of performance problems? It would be gratefully received.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It’s not that foreign to experience things like this. Just flip a switch with an LED or Incandescent bulb - notice how instantaneous it reacts to the switch action. Then do the same with fluorescent bulb with a ballast. The world is full of instantly reacting stuff. From writing to playing ping pong, we expect a certain amount of latency and no more. That’s why soft suspension cars are not fun (even if their performance was great, it’s not) because so much of driving pleasure comes from the tactility and Human-to-Machine interaction - basically brain seeks faster feedback so the control loop is tight. :) Enjoy the physical world. It’s amazing.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    > "That’s why soft suspension cars are not fun (even if their performance was great, it’s not) because so much of driving pleasure comes from the tactility and Human-to-Machine interaction - basically brain seeks faster feedback so the control loop is tight." As with anything in the physical world, it is a lot more complicated than that :-) I know most people and certainly most car enthusiasts think you need stiff suspension and wide low-profile tires to have the most fun driving, but that's not necessarily true. For the fastest times around a track, you obviously need as much grip as you can possibly get, and you can run very very stiff suspension because of the flat and even surface. You probably also want a dual-clutch or F1-style automated gearbox and an intelligent AWD system with complex driver aids, like in the Nissan GT-R. However based on my experience, if you're looking for the most fun driving experience, and not just the best numbers on a score sheet, you need to go in a different direction. What you want is a lightweight car on relatively skinny tires with a decent amount of sidewall, and most importantly a suspension with long travel, softly sprung and stiffly damped. That's the Colin Chapman (of Lotus fame) British sports car approach, which is perfect for real world fun, chucking a nimble and communicative car around empty B-roads in the countryside. The reason for not choosing super wide low-profile tires is that having more sidewall in relation to width lets the tire flex more on the wheel, which lets the entire chassis communicate more. It's true that a low-profile tire will feel more "snappy" or "crisp" and have a higher absolute limit of grip, but it also gives you much less warning when you're approaching the limit than a skinnier and taller tire would. Decreasing the absolute limit of grip and making the margin of error wider lets you play around more, making it easier to get that extremely satisfying four-wheel drift around a fast sweeping corner. By making the car less sharp and crisp, but more communicative, you increase the tactility and driver involvement. It's the difference between grip and handling. A grippy car with just grip and grip and grip, but a car with good handling will tell you what's going on and involve you in the process. All of this is why Toyota/Subaru specified relatively narrow and completely ordinary road tires (Michelin Primacy IIRC) for the GT-86/BRZ sports car, because it's more fun, more of the time.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Those amber and green displays were 80 chars x 24 lines - which is quite a bit less than a modern 5K monitor. They also connected to their host at 1200 baud, or if you were really lucky twice that. (You could go faster if you had an entire mainframe to yourself, but most people didn't.) So while you could edit instantly on the display itself, doing any actual computing required a lot of waiting for the text... to... appear... from... left... to... right... I learned to write software in a room full of VT100s connected to an underpowered DEC KS10, and I have zero nostalgia for the terminal technology of the day.