“Not as clumsy or random as Windows. An elegant terminal, for a more civilized age.” [Ben Kenobi] might well have said that about the Hewlett-Packard 264x-series of serial terminals, in use starting at just about the time the original installment of the Star Wars franchise was released. With their wide-screen CRTs and toaster-oven aesthetic, they were oddballs in the terminal market, and [CuriousMarc] has gone and made one even odder by converting an H-P 2645A to display the Aurebesh character set from the movies.
A look under the hood of this lovely bit of retrocomputing history makes one think the designers almost foresaw the need to add support for a made-up language nearly half a century later. The terminal has a backplane and bus for pluggable cards, one of which carries the ROMs that [Marc] extracted and reprogrammed with the Aurebesh characters. He had a little trouble at first, needing to bodge the chip select and forgetting that he had made other “special modifications” to the terminal. The video below shows the results, along with some fatherly mortification of his daughters and a suitable tribute to the lately late [Peter Mayhew], he who donned the Wookiee suit and made a seven-foot space Sasquatch lovable.
Need more for you “May the Fourth” fix? How about a clumsy and random blaster, a cosplay speeder bike, or a fleet of droids?
So you can teach an old dog new trick, nice.
How about porting the ASCIImation version of Star Wars to it? https://mashable.com/2015/12/18/star-wars-episode-iv-ascii/
Don’t have to port if you just telnet in…
He runs it at the end of the video, but the terminal is too fast to display it properly.
Evidently they didn’t watch the video
Yeah but the brains of the terminal are housed on the Death Star essentially. It is useless without another.
Having used the 2645 and 2648 for many years, there are versions that include a rape drive (cartridge). The terminal is already programmable, and if you could locate them, there are a couple of games available for these terminals. I remember one downhill ski game and another race game.
s/rape/tape
Paging Dr. Freud :’)
I actually made a video about the HP 2645 games: https://youtu.be/4xVV-bbNlmI
Hate to be that guy but isn’t it “from a more civilized time” ?😅
Sir Alec respectfully disagrees:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aRtupiY9Dw
This is a really nice terminal. I’d never heard of these, the DEC ones got all the glory later on.. I knew of later HP terminals like the 700/96 but they weren’t much to write home about.
But someone in the youtube comments said this one can do 9600 without pausing, which is really impressive for those days.