4 ms·

Digital VT100 (1978)

44 points by Breadmaker 6y ago

mmastrac 6y ago
Hugged to death. archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210119124740/https://www.oldcomputr.com/digital-vt100-1978/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210119124740/https://www.oldco...
floren 6y ago
Old video terminals are beautiful. I owned an ADM-3a for a period, but gave it to a fellow collector because the flyback transformer whine gave me headaches (he's old enough that he can't hear it). The VT100 definitely lives near the top of my wishlist... I've got a nice pair of Amiga machines, but I'd trade them both for a working VT100 with very little hesitation :)
- hazeii 6y ago
  The first place I worked, the grunts got teletypes but the boss had an ADM-3A. Later on, I used a lot of different VT100 compatibles, plus genuine VT100s/VT10xs and (on occasion) ADM-3As. All connected to PDP11's of one sort or another. Personally, the nicest one I ever used was a Pericom [0], about the only model that I'd rate above the actual VT100. It had a few annoyances related to imperfect VT100 emulation, but it has the sharpest screen ever (there was some sort of a fine black mesh over the tube that enhanced the display). [0] http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800-Terminal-troubleshooting-Videoproblem http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800...
  - mprovost 6y ago
    I was digging around the Unix history repo and found a BSD program cat3a [0] written by Bill Joy in 1977 to "cat to an adm3a quickly". It blanks the screen and prints a file directly to the tty at 80 columns wide. Of course that's the terminal that he also wrote vi on - it has arrows on the hjkl keys. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development/s6/cat3a.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-S...
shimonabi 6y ago
I had a chance to buy a VT-101 a few months ago, but without the keyboard. Maybe the guy still has it. I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a Raspberry Pi.
- floren 6y ago
  > I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a Raspberry Pi. Should be quite easy. You'll need a USB-serial adapter for the Pi, and a cable with a 9-pin serial adapter on one end and a 25-pin on the other. Now, the way my luck works, it usually turns out that my random assortment of serial cables means I end up with the USB converter, a null modem adapter, the serial cable, and a 25-pin gender-bender just to get all the wires in the right order and fitting into the ports properly :)
- guenthert 6y ago
  The RPi has a serial port on which Linux can present a console. It's just a matter of converting the 3v3 RX/TX signal to some 12V RS-232 level. Plenty of devices or instructions out there.
abraae 6y ago
Old video terminals demonstrate the beauty and timelessness of solid protocol design. While old computers are effectively useless except as curiosities, an old video terminal is still just as good at its job as when new.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Back in the 90s I had to do some on-the-spot coding to fix a problem on a SGI machine using an ancient green terminal of some kind. It worked, but the keyboard lacked curly braces {} so I used trigraphs[1] for the first and last time. The fact it worked at all is pretty impressive. There was even a termcap entry for the ancient and crusty terminal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C
  - guenthert 6y ago
    In the late 90s (way after their time) I briefly got to use an old green terminal (which I believed to be a VT100). Those didn't have an ESC key. I figured then that's where the ^[ substitute comes from.
billsmithaustin 6y ago
Most quirky VT100 feature: smooth scroll.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Most quirky, IMO: double-high/double-wide characters. Most obnoxious, from the standpoint of a terminal emulator developer: origin mode.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    The VTE folk didn't like when I brought that up. It creates a number of interesting corner cases with text reflow on window resizes.
- hazeii 6y ago
  Managed to score a lot of points once by having a columnar display collapse itself with smooth scroll to make space for additional info beneath it (define a scroll region over the centre part of the display, cursor position to the bottom and print more stuff - with line drawing chars forming a grid the effect was very effective). Smooth scroll is actually quite easy in hardware, as it's just a case of changing the scan line offset by 1 each frame. A small handful of TTL chips will do it, later a small tweak to the CRT controller, and nowadays about a bazillion CPU cycles to do it in software.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Sadly I never convinced the VTE maintainers that it'd be a nice-to-have. To be frank, it'd require some departures from the original - speeding up to consume large off-screen buffers and slowing down to a human pace when the buffers clear - and, like any extra feature, it'd be a burden to be carried for the foreseeable future, so I completely understand them saying a polite, but emphatic, no.
W-Stool 6y ago
Way back in the day (late 70's) I worked on VAX systems for a large automaker whose management sincerely believed if you weren't using some monster from IBM you really weren't doing much important and thus there was never enough funding to go around to make sure everyone in the VAX group had a terminal on their desk. In my group there was some real status of having your own VT-100 on your desk and I still have the b/w photo of me at my desk the day I got mine.
- Diederich 6y ago
  I would love to see that photo. Starting in the late 1980s, I spent a lot of quality time with DEC VT220 terminals. Solid buggers.
markc 6y ago
I still have my VT100 "Keypad Condom" - a rubber overlay for the numeric keypad for the EDT editor. A great editor it was too!
OliverJones 6y ago
Brings back memories. I worked at Digital for a while, and we got those things at transfer cost. So all our team had them, until the VT220s came along. They could do lower case. !! It has to be said, plastics technology has improved a bit. Those things weren't UV stabilized at all.
gumby 6y ago
For anyone who never saw one: the original color was closer (but not the same!) to "IBM PC beige"; the cases yellowed due to sunlight, age, and (given the era), nicotine. The open base that shows the inside shows a color closer to the original.
- shashurup 6y ago
  Interesting, this "nicotine-yellow" make the appearance a lot better IMO.
fuzzfactor 6y ago
I used to connect terminals to this kind of benchtop data system: https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4j03d056k https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4j03d056k The first multi-user multi-tasking computer that would fit on a _desk_. 1MHz, 16K of 32bit memory. Weighed over 50lbs. It was designed to be compatible with the VT-100 since there was a mode where the system used special escape codes from the remote terminal to substitute for instrument function keys on the local console keyboard. Manually or by script once smart terminals came out. To save memory each user could run multiple instances of the same basic program plus more than one basic program at a time. His one chromatograph is mainly not pictured, it is to the left of the data system and weighed about 80lbs.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I remember going to my local waste disposal site and someone was throwing a dozen of these in the skip.

44 points by Breadmaker 6y ago

Hugged to death. archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210119124740/https://www.oldcomputr.com/digital-vt100-1978/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210119124740/https://www.oldco...

floren 6y ago

Old video terminals are beautiful. I owned an ADM-3a for a period, but gave it to a fellow collector because the flyback transformer whine gave me headaches (he's old enough that he can't hear it). The VT100 definitely lives near the top of my wishlist... I've got a nice pair of Amiga machines, but I'd trade them both for a working VT100 with very little hesitation :)

hazeii 6y ago
The first place I worked, the grunts got teletypes but the boss had an ADM-3A. Later on, I used a lot of different VT100 compatibles, plus genuine VT100s/VT10xs and (on occasion) ADM-3As. All connected to PDP11's of one sort or another. Personally, the nicest one I ever used was a Pericom [0], about the only model that I'd rate above the actual VT100. It had a few annoyances related to imperfect VT100 emulation, but it has the sharpest screen ever (there was some sort of a fine black mesh over the tube that enhanced the display). [0] http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800-Terminal-troubleshooting-Videoproblem http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800...
- mprovost 6y ago
  I was digging around the Unix history repo and found a BSD program cat3a [0] written by Bill Joy in 1977 to "cat to an adm3a quickly". It blanks the screen and prints a file directly to the tty at 80 columns wide. Of course that's the terminal that he also wrote vi on - it has arrows on the hjkl keys. [0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-Snapshot-Development/s6/cat3a.c https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-S...

shimonabi 6y ago

I had a chance to buy a VT-101 a few months ago, but without the keyboard. Maybe the guy still has it. I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a Raspberry Pi.

floren 6y ago
> I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a Raspberry Pi. Should be quite easy. You'll need a USB-serial adapter for the Pi, and a cable with a 9-pin serial adapter on one end and a 25-pin on the other. Now, the way my luck works, it usually turns out that my random assortment of serial cables means I end up with the USB converter, a null modem adapter, the serial cable, and a 25-pin gender-bender just to get all the wires in the right order and fitting into the ports properly :)
guenthert 6y ago
The RPi has a serial port on which Linux can present a console. It's just a matter of converting the 3v3 RX/TX signal to some 12V RS-232 level. Plenty of devices or instructions out there.

abraae 6y ago

Old video terminals demonstrate the beauty and timelessness of solid protocol design. While old computers are effectively useless except as curiosities, an old video terminal is still just as good at its job as when new.

jandrese 6y ago
Back in the 90s I had to do some on-the-spot coding to fix a problem on a SGI machine using an ancient green terminal of some kind. It worked, but the keyboard lacked curly braces {} so I used trigraphs[1] for the first and last time. The fact it worked at all is pretty impressive. There was even a termcap entry for the ancient and crusty terminal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs#C
- guenthert 6y ago
  In the late 90s (way after their time) I briefly got to use an old green terminal (which I believed to be a VT100). Those didn't have an ESC key. I figured then that's where the ^[ substitute comes from.

billsmithaustin 6y ago

Most quirky VT100 feature: smooth scroll.

duskwuff 6y ago
Most quirky, IMO: double-high/double-wide characters. Most obnoxious, from the standpoint of a terminal emulator developer: origin mode.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The VTE folk didn't like when I brought that up. It creates a number of interesting corner cases with text reflow on window resizes.
hazeii 6y ago
Managed to score a lot of points once by having a columnar display collapse itself with smooth scroll to make space for additional info beneath it (define a scroll region over the centre part of the display, cursor position to the bottom and print more stuff - with line drawing chars forming a grid the effect was very effective). Smooth scroll is actually quite easy in hardware, as it's just a case of changing the scan line offset by 1 each frame. A small handful of TTL chips will do it, later a small tweak to the CRT controller, and nowadays about a bazillion CPU cycles to do it in software.
rbanffy 6y ago
Sadly I never convinced the VTE maintainers that it'd be a nice-to-have. To be frank, it'd require some departures from the original - speeding up to consume large off-screen buffers and slowing down to a human pace when the buffers clear - and, like any extra feature, it'd be a burden to be carried for the foreseeable future, so I completely understand them saying a polite, but emphatic, no.

W-Stool 6y ago

Way back in the day (late 70's) I worked on VAX systems for a large automaker whose management sincerely believed if you weren't using some monster from IBM you really weren't doing much important and thus there was never enough funding to go around to make sure everyone in the VAX group had a terminal on their desk. In my group there was some real status of having your own VT-100 on your desk and I still have the b/w photo of me at my desk the day I got mine.

Diederich 6y ago
I would love to see that photo. Starting in the late 1980s, I spent a lot of quality time with DEC VT220 terminals. Solid buggers.

markc 6y ago

I still have my VT100 "Keypad Condom" - a rubber overlay for the numeric keypad for the EDT editor. A great editor it was too!

OliverJones 6y ago

Brings back memories. I worked at Digital for a while, and we got those things at transfer cost. So all our team had them, until the VT220s came along. They could do lower case. !! It has to be said, plastics technology has improved a bit. Those things weren't UV stabilized at all.

gumby 6y ago

For anyone who never saw one: the original color was closer (but not the same!) to "IBM PC beige"; the cases yellowed due to sunlight, age, and (given the era), nicotine. The open base that shows the inside shows a color closer to the original.

shashurup 6y ago
Interesting, this "nicotine-yellow" make the appearance a lot better IMO.

fuzzfactor 6y ago

I used to connect terminals to this kind of benchtop data system: https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4j03d056k https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4j03d056k The first multi-user multi-tasking computer that would fit on a _desk_. 1MHz, 16K of 32bit memory. Weighed over 50lbs. It was designed to be compatible with the VT-100 since there was a mode where the system used special escape codes from the remote terminal to substitute for instrument function keys on the local console keyboard. Manually or by script once smart terminals came out. To save memory each user could run multiple instances of the same basic program plus more than one basic program at a time. His one chromatograph is mainly not pictured, it is to the left of the data system and weighed about 80lbs.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

I remember going to my local waste disposal site and someone was throwing a dozen of these in the skip.