3 ms·

>Real (hardware) terminals need that. I wonder who uses real terminals and for what.

dataflow 3y ago
> I wonder who uses real terminals and for what. I'm guessing the same people who believed 1991 was the year of Linux on the desktop.
ssl-3 3y ago
I used to have some real (hardware) terminals, back in the day when (what we then called) IP Masquerading was still kind of new, Ethernet was still expensive to sensibly implement, and old cheap still-useful PC hardware didn't usually exist (and things like freebie "closet laptops" absolutely did not exist at all). It was a bit of a different world back then. Most of my Internet and general-computing experience happened in a terminal -- whether xterm, 80x25, or a silly high-res BIOS-based text mode set using svgatextmode. Text-based web browsing with Lynx was still useful, and Pine (email) and tin (usenet) were well-suited to those applications at that time. I had a desktop Linux (or sometimes, FreeBSD) box that I of course did all kinds of stuff with, and at least one remote shell account on a far-away computer to provide continuity, and I also had a couple of DEC VT330 terminals that I scored cheap at the Dayton hamfest. One was next to my favorite armchair so I could chat on IRC and listen to the stereo in the sweet spot at the same time. Another was in the bedroom, which I mostly used for reading books and other passive consumption. It all worked well, of course. There was no reason for it not to work well. And at a time when the Internet was kind of a weird thing to be involved with at all, and almost always involved exactly one person using one dialup connection in exactly one physical location, I could meander around and do my usual Internet things in a few different locations in the house (thanks, screen!). I didn't really build it for multiple users. But sometimes, the girlfriend would hang out and chat on IRC in one place while I did my own Internet things elsewhere, all on a light-weight 32-bit computer with only a few megabytes of RAM. It did fine. --- But your question was present-tense. Because life has a way of things, I've sadly lost track of those VT330s. And your implication is correct: I haven't seen a standalone terminal in the wild for a really, really long time. In the present-tense, I kind of miss the expediency of the interface. Many of us here use terminal emulators every day, so it may sound like I'm preaching to the choir, but I mean: The expedience of the text-based interfaces out in the wild. It is seemingly as lost as my VT330s are. It used to be that if I needed a set of spark plugs for a car, then I might pop over to Autozone. The guy behind the counter there would mash in the make/model/year almost instantly on the terminal's keyboard, as if by muscle memory, and almost immediately he'd be rattling off different options, prices, and features. Nowadays it's all web based. The parts store clerk's stupid-fast muscle memory has been replaced by mousing around interactively -- clicking and drooling (and worse: scrolling through stupid HTML dropdowns to find "Toyota," or "Volvo") through a website that is very much like the same website I can use from home. And that website sucks, time-wise, compared to the dumb terminal interface that they used to have muxed back to the home base. (The only advantage I can find to the web interface that has been in place for a quarter of a century now is that it has pictures, but the pictures are often simply wrong. Bad data is no data, so this is a misfeature.)
- firewolf34 3y ago
  A wonderful story and very interesting to think that things were faster in some ways when the laymen had to use the CLI/TUI. Here I am in 2024 actually trying to rebuild a setup very similar to yours; I do a lot of regular text editing to take notes and logs and journals, and with the world moving the text-first notetaking tools like Obsidian (markdown) or the classic and lovely Emacs (org-mode/roam), it's become more and more important to write and access text quickly. And I think even us on HN have seen similar push for text use as paramount: people scraping away the guff from websites to end up with summarized texts and pseudo-RSS feeds, NLP and LLM reworking text to make it evermore accessible to us humans. Text is king. And the rest is just clutter. So, given that, why not have more terminals around the home? Buying extra PCs and thin-clients is a start, but expensive - what I /really/ need is /interfaces/, monitors and keyboards to work /quickly/. In the age of smartphone soft-keyboards I think we can all agree that typing on them or doing text work is horrible. Yet that's where most text is written. So my point is, maybe we shouldn't have strayed so far - and I think there's a vibrant community of hackers bringing back CLI/TUI as a primary method of interaction. In fact, the physical terminal TTY is actually still quite useful and common for embedded hardware engineers who use it frequently, or old school hardware enthusiasts like this guy [1] who use modern MCUs to work with the traditional terminal standards, which, of course, still work great in Linux like nothing has changed :) [1]: https://youtu.be/pyoiQKK-eh0 https://youtu.be/pyoiQKK-eh0
Yizahi 3y ago
Probably the same people who use text editors which mangle "tab" characters. (never seen one ever, in 15-20 years of using computers and working with embedded devices)
Turing_Machine 3y ago
One of my friends had a real VT-102 that he used on dialup bulletin boards for years. Edit: also with our University VAX. Yeah, this was a while ago. He had an RS-232 modem cabled to it, and would dial using AT commands. I was thinking that Bloomberg still used dedicated terminals, but I just checked and nowadays they're just normal computers with dedicated software and custom keyboards.
bongodongobob 3y ago
I ran into one about 10 years ago. It was a bespoke diagnostic tool for some industrial machinery. It was only needed for last resort situations to get in via serial and gracefully rescue the HMI from a freeze or sync issue where the machine found itself in an impossible state doing maintenance to prevent having to do a physical lockout and shutdown situation or something like that. Never saw it actually used though as the beast was built before laptops and USB serial adapters were a thing. It was probably collecting dust for a decade before I came across it.
simonjgreen 3y ago
I’ve seen large scale epos systems in more complex sales environments like furniture or brown goods that use them. All old of course.

> I wonder who uses real terminals and for what. I'm guessing the same people who believed 1991 was the year of Linux on the desktop.

ssl-3 3y ago

I used to have some real (hardware) terminals, back in the day when (what we then called) IP Masquerading was still kind of new, Ethernet was still expensive to sensibly implement, and old cheap still-useful PC hardware didn't usually exist (and things like freebie "closet laptops" absolutely did not exist at all). It was a bit of a different world back then. Most of my Internet and general-computing experience happened in a terminal -- whether xterm, 80x25, or a silly high-res BIOS-based text mode set using svgatextmode. Text-based web browsing with Lynx was still useful, and Pine (email) and tin (usenet) were well-suited to those applications at that time. I had a desktop Linux (or sometimes, FreeBSD) box that I of course did all kinds of stuff with, and at least one remote shell account on a far-away computer to provide continuity, and I also had a couple of DEC VT330 terminals that I scored cheap at the Dayton hamfest. One was next to my favorite armchair so I could chat on IRC and listen to the stereo in the sweet spot at the same time. Another was in the bedroom, which I mostly used for reading books and other passive consumption. It all worked well, of course. There was no reason for it not to work well. And at a time when the Internet was kind of a weird thing to be involved with at all, and almost always involved exactly one person using one dialup connection in exactly one physical location, I could meander around and do my usual Internet things in a few different locations in the house (thanks, screen!). I didn't really build it for multiple users. But sometimes, the girlfriend would hang out and chat on IRC in one place while I did my own Internet things elsewhere, all on a light-weight 32-bit computer with only a few megabytes of RAM. It did fine. --- But your question was present-tense. Because life has a way of things, I've sadly lost track of those VT330s. And your implication is correct: I haven't seen a standalone terminal in the wild for a really, really long time. In the present-tense, I kind of miss the expediency of the interface. Many of us here use terminal emulators every day, so it may sound like I'm preaching to the choir, but I mean: The expedience of the text-based interfaces out in the wild. It is seemingly as lost as my VT330s are. It used to be that if I needed a set of spark plugs for a car, then I might pop over to Autozone. The guy behind the counter there would mash in the make/model/year almost instantly on the terminal's keyboard, as if by muscle memory, and almost immediately he'd be rattling off different options, prices, and features. Nowadays it's all web based. The parts store clerk's stupid-fast muscle memory has been replaced by mousing around interactively -- clicking and drooling (and worse: scrolling through stupid HTML dropdowns to find "Toyota," or "Volvo") through a website that is very much like the same website I can use from home. And that website sucks, time-wise, compared to the dumb terminal interface that they used to have muxed back to the home base. (The only advantage I can find to the web interface that has been in place for a quarter of a century now is that it has pictures, but the pictures are often simply wrong. Bad data is no data, so this is a misfeature.)

firewolf34 3y ago
A wonderful story and very interesting to think that things were faster in some ways when the laymen had to use the CLI/TUI. Here I am in 2024 actually trying to rebuild a setup very similar to yours; I do a lot of regular text editing to take notes and logs and journals, and with the world moving the text-first notetaking tools like Obsidian (markdown) or the classic and lovely Emacs (org-mode/roam), it's become more and more important to write and access text quickly. And I think even us on HN have seen similar push for text use as paramount: people scraping away the guff from websites to end up with summarized texts and pseudo-RSS feeds, NLP and LLM reworking text to make it evermore accessible to us humans. Text is king. And the rest is just clutter. So, given that, why not have more terminals around the home? Buying extra PCs and thin-clients is a start, but expensive - what I /really/ need is /interfaces/, monitors and keyboards to work /quickly/. In the age of smartphone soft-keyboards I think we can all agree that typing on them or doing text work is horrible. Yet that's where most text is written. So my point is, maybe we shouldn't have strayed so far - and I think there's a vibrant community of hackers bringing back CLI/TUI as a primary method of interaction. In fact, the physical terminal TTY is actually still quite useful and common for embedded hardware engineers who use it frequently, or old school hardware enthusiasts like this guy [1] who use modern MCUs to work with the traditional terminal standards, which, of course, still work great in Linux like nothing has changed :) [1]: https://youtu.be/pyoiQKK-eh0 https://youtu.be/pyoiQKK-eh0

Yizahi 3y ago

Probably the same people who use text editors which mangle "tab" characters. (never seen one ever, in 15-20 years of using computers and working with embedded devices)

Turing_Machine 3y ago

One of my friends had a real VT-102 that he used on dialup bulletin boards for years. Edit: also with our University VAX. Yeah, this was a while ago. He had an RS-232 modem cabled to it, and would dial using AT commands. I was thinking that Bloomberg still used dedicated terminals, but I just checked and nowadays they're just normal computers with dedicated software and custom keyboards.

bongodongobob 3y ago

I ran into one about 10 years ago. It was a bespoke diagnostic tool for some industrial machinery. It was only needed for last resort situations to get in via serial and gracefully rescue the HMI from a freeze or sync issue where the machine found itself in an impossible state doing maintenance to prevent having to do a physical lockout and shutdown situation or something like that. Never saw it actually used though as the beast was built before laptops and USB serial adapters were a thing. It was probably collecting dust for a decade before I came across it.

simonjgreen 3y ago

I’ve seen large scale epos systems in more complex sales environments like furniture or brown goods that use them. All old of course.