Having fun with dumb terminals

terminal

For a long time now, [Morgan] has been wanting an old serial terminal. In a stroke of luck, one of his pals at the Quelab hackerspace scored an awesome ADM-3A terminal from a collector. It's a historically significant piece of computing and UNIX history, so obviously [Morgan] needed to get it working. The ADM-3A terminal pre-dates the famous DEC VT-100 terminal, but since [Morgan]'s new … [Read more...]

Shoehorning RS-232 into a Minitel terminal

minitel

In the early 80s, millions of terminals were handed out to French telephone subscribers. Nearly 9 million of these Minitel dumb terminals were in use at one time, and with that degree of ubiquity, we're surprised we haven't heard of them before. These boxes were usually connected to the outside world through their internal 1200bps modem, but [O. Blt] came up with this build (Google Translate link) … [Read more...]