You may not know what a ADM-3, a TV910, or a H1420 are, but you probably have at least heard of a VT-100. They are all terminals from around the same time, but the DEC VT-100 is the terminal that practically everything today at least somewhat emulates. Even though a real VT-100 is rare, since it defined what have become ANSI escape sequences, most computers you’ve used in the last few decades speak some variation of the VT-100’s language. [Nikhil] wanted to see if you could use a VT-100 for real work today.
While the VT-100 wasn’t a general-purpose computer, it did have an 8080 inside. It only had about 3K of RAM, which was enough to act as a serial terminal. A USB serial port and a terminal with modern Linux, how hard could it be?
As it turns out there were a few issues. MacOS assumes terminals can take data at 9600 baud with no handshaking, apparently. It also means that any application that assumes redrawing the whole terminal is fast will be sorry for that choice.
Of course, there are commands modern VT-100-like terminals accept that the original didn’t. However, as you’ll see in the post, all of these things you can either live with or solve.
It is easy to make your own VT-100 replica. While the VT-100 may seem simple today, it was a marvel compared to even older terminals.
I miss my Amber VT110…. always wished it’d been green. My favorite color.
Just checked, the Terminal application bundled with MS Windows 1.x and 2.x does support VT-52 and ANSI.
The Terminal of Windows 3.x supports TTY (generic), DEC VT-100 (ANSI), DEC VT-52.
Some screenshots found here:
http://toastytech.com/guis/win1013.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/win203.html
I don’t regret a ton of things, but i do severely regret that i had a working VT 320 (i think) sitting in my home for most of the 90s and threw it out sometime after 2000.
The VT320 was the one that supports multiple sessions, IIRC. I wrote Ultrix support for it – and then they never shipped the software.
I have a DEC VT52 which needs a little TLC – character board is bust, a DEC VT100 in working order and a little Wyse60. It’s been a while and my units are in storage however I love just logging into a more powerful Linux server over serial to do stuff rather than using a laptop. There’s something fulfilling about flicking the power switch and waiting for the screen to come up and give you a prompt.
Might revisit this soon 😀
I still have a VT-100 (actually a VT-132, which had more memory so it could display 132 columns in all rows). When I left DEC, they forgot I had it, so I kept it. Haven’t turned it on in years.
I used real VT-100s at Hughes Aircraft in the late 90’s. My section of Hughes was very much in the if-it-ain’t-broke mold when it came to test equipment, and since the missile computer test bench controller was a PDP-11/70, it was period appropriate. I was not a fan of the keyboard, and the displays weren’t so much burned in as burned through.
Around about 2000, someone finally cut loose some money to replace them with VT-320s, and replace the PDP with a PDP-on-a-card emulator in a rack mount PC.
Seems like we used VT100 (or similar) in the college computer lab during the 80s to get to the campus VAX. Now-a-days, I like to start ‘cool-retro-term’ to get the feeling back of an old crt once in awhile.
I also created a dos like application that runs on RP2350 boards (like Fruit Jam) with the ansi escape codes support for serial connections. Text can be different colors, cursor can be moved as necessary, etc… Most all serial/telnet/ssh clients support the sequences like Putty.
Same experience, but the dorm VT100s were always in use. I often had to settle for using the dorm printer, which was a repurposed teletype.
I know what you mean about being in use…. Busy place… There were a few teletypes there also… Lucky for me, I was able to purchase a DEC Rainbow with 256K of RAM (half price to students, but still pricey) and dial in from home (yes, the college was in my home town) to access the VAX. Turbo Pascal was available by then, and was able to do a lot of the programming assignments off-line, and then up-load to the VAX and re-compile there. Sneaker net a floppy to another PC lab which had several Rainbows to do printing of reports and such. Those were the days!
I had an ADM-3A and a 1200 baud model in college from the company I worked for part time – but we had VT-100s at the office for the PDP 11/44 running RSTS.
The VT-220 that I eventually had on my desk at my first job out of college was probably the pinnacle. Downloadable fonts weren’t used by a lot of apps, but Word Perfect for VAX/VMS used it for representing a low-res version of graphics added on Mac or PC.
I beat the shared terminal racket by having my personal KSR-33 (and acoustic coupler) in my dorm room. Calls on campus were free, and I had a job at the Computing Center (repairing Teletypes), so life was good.
The Teletype (parts of it, at least), came from the Honeywell Surplus Outlet on Rt 9 in Framingham. Coincidentally, there happened to be a Teletype Repair Depot just down the road, so I took my box of Teletype parts in and asked if they could build me a complete machine out of them. Some unnamed tech, to whom I will forever be grateful, did just that, and charged me only $175. I used that machine through four years of college and (regrettably) eventually put it out on the kerb with manuals and a supply of paper. It was gone almost immediately, and I like to think it had a long life somewhere else.
I went back to the linked June 2021 Replica VT-100 discussion, but I believe Cool Retro Term does everything I want, and what other posters wanted, in a simulation/emulation; including ghosting phosphor effects, screen curvature, and it has presets like: “IBM VGA 8×16” and “IBM 3278 Reborn”, which isn’t DEC, but close enough to VT-100 for me.
I have a fond memories in the 90s of using VT-220s at multiple local libraries, I’m not even sure if they were running VMS or some Un*x on the servers, but I was fed up with the ridiculously clumsy websearch filters on the PCs there. It made looking up “Phillip K. Dick” a challenge, among many other innocent terms, and they enforced a time limit. So I turned to the VT-220s, (the towns were near DEC in Maynard, they all had DEC terminals) and brought up “The Internet Poetry Database” which was simply a link to the site brought up in the Lynx web browser (text-only). There was some key combo which would bring up the URL address bar. This reinforced my faith in the command line, and I investigated Linux soon after.
Except for the nostalgia for CRTs(not much gaming in this case beyond Tetris and Pong), I don’t know why anyone would want to take on such a project. Maybe IBM 3270 terminals for logging into mainframes, (although the x3270 suite of terminal emulation seems decent) and anything with a decent keyboard. Different strokes… I suppose
I largely agree. Real CRT-based terminals are just too large on the desktop. I do feel some nostalgia, I did some software dev projects using a DEC VT240, and that VT240 had quite a manageable size for the time (12 inch screen, and I had much better eye sight back then). But that’s about it. Never thought of buying one, a VT240 was small but still too much in the way on my desktop.
But while working on an old SYM-1 mainboard, that only has a serial connection, no video, I found I was using two laptops. One for communicating with the SYM-1, and one for accessing the internet and other resources. And I found myself wishing I had a terminal that could fit in a drawer and I could grab whenever I needed it, like a tool, could connect it to the general-purpose LCD screen that I have on my desk, attach a small keyboard, and go.
I found out about the FabGL library for the ESP32, found out about the uTerm2-S (it’s on Hackaday), and decided to not use that but make my own version of it, which is now largely done and working.
How? That makes no sense to me. A 15″ TFT, standard 104 keys keyboard and a Thin Client are not smaller than, say, a Wyse 30.
I had one of them and it wasn’t heavy, either.
It was very compact and tidy, few wires on the desk (keyboard, AC, serial cable).
By comparison, a thin client needs a power brick, vga cable, a monitor, monitor power cable, USB mouse/keyboard, another audio cable etc.
The desk will be full of wires compared to just having a compact terminal sitting there.
I can only agree with you here. :) But we were thinking of different use-cases. I was thinking of a VT-220 terminal on the already sparse desk space of my lab, which has to share space with an oscilloscope, a laptop, a bench power supply, soldering iron and heat gun, and then the ‘application’ itself (a SYM-1 in my case, but could just as well be a PDP11 if I ever find one for a price that will compete with the trouble I would have to go through with my wife:)).
Ah, I see, that makes sense. 😅
I found a bug in the VT240 code and fixed it, while waiting for the project I was hired for to go into development. (It never did)
The fix was in the Tektronix emulation mode, where IIRC the low part of the y coordinate could be 0177, and some by-then obsolete OS’s would insert that code to pad after a CR because printing terminals could not handle the next character until the printhead actually returned, and that could take some time. There was an alternative character for the low y coordinate. The VT240 code would convert to 0177 and then check and ignore 0177. No one had ever noticed the bug and probably my fix didn’t matter.
I miss being able to animate emails by repeatedly typing and backspacing characters. I also miss being able to add CTL-G’s to emails
REAL old skool – had a VT-05 that I buil;t up from scrap parts (some repair required) when I was in Grad school and worked for DEC over the summers. I eventually sold it to some one at MIT. After I graduated, I worked on the Data General D200 terminal, which had a Motorola 6802 core, programmed all in assembly. One of the design requirements was that it do 9600 baud without handshaking, which it did. No 19.2k though.
I love how, from the side, that VT-05 looks like a white version of the helmet of one of those Death Star weapon operators. :D I really love how it looks. I wish I had one.
But still: I do understand why they added those side flaps (to prevent the sun reflecting off the screen), but just thinking about how they would restrict the movement of my arms and wrists is already giving me RSI.
But personally I love the looks of the HP2640 series the most. They were huge, but somehow greatly appeal to my idea of aesthetics. Or maybe it’s just nostalgia, as these were extensively used in the ’80’s by Philips, where my dad used to work.