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Integrating a VT220 into my life

drewdevault.com

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Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#111

Post by mikekchar »

dsr_ wrote: post #23
tgflynn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the contrast on an old CRT really better than on a modern LCD screen ? I find that a bit hard to believe but I certainly don't have any way to check. You could run a plain vanilla window manager with a single xterm if you want to avoid distractions.

It depends. You can crank up the brightness much higher on a CRT, and so you can get better contrast in a sunny room. In a dark room, any decent LCD and any half-decent CRT can get the characters uncomfortably bright. But it's only 80x25! I may have read megabytes of email and Usenet on such things, but I always lusted over the big displays of the Suns that could fit 40 rows down, and change character size to match m…

Ha ha! I suffer ocular migraines and found that a super huge font helps me avoid migraines. With the font I use, I get 111x26 :-) One of the things that prompted me to try such a ridiculous font is remembering using 80x25 terminals for the first few years of my career. I have absolutely no trouble programming this way. Trying to pair program like that, though, is problematic ;-)

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#112

Post by technofiend »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #51

The VT220 is fascinating as an example of "old" computer technology that still influences the devices we use on a daily basis. I've recently had to understand exactly which control characters are sent between the app and the terminal ( emulator ) for delete and backspace. Guess which ASCII control characters is sent by the Backspace key on your PC keyboard? ASCII DEL (0x7F/^?)! All modern terminal emulators on Linux…

Same with H, J, K, L in VI because of the ADM 3A's escape sequences emitted when using that terminal's arrow keys.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#113

Post by fit2rule »

paulmd wrote: post #76
aexaey wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1mA/MIPS is a pretty generous power budget, with ESP8266 easily fitting the bill (56mA @80MHz + wifi rx; 10 uA in deep sleep [1]). Talking of which - here is Jeroen Domburg's project where he used exactly this chip to make a wireless battery-powered e-ink display: [0] http://spritesmods.com/?art=einkdisplay [1] http://bbs.espressif.com/viewtopic.php?t=133

I'd forgotten all about the ESP8266 but this project is about 95% of what I'm aiming for. The rest should be relatively trivial programming work, so thanks! Can't speak for the other guy (who wants a portable monitor+keyboard system), but what I'm mostly looking for is a terminal that I could carry around/outside the house (i.e. potentially high-glare conditions) and program while connected to wifi, while not recharg…

I have been working on the MagicShifter project (http://magicshifter.net/) and we designed the board so that the UART is available (for MIDI and other things).

If I can find a paper-ink display that I can drive somehow with a UART, I'd be quite happy to wire it up and hack up a MagicShifter app that turns it into a dumb terminal. Know of such a thing?

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#114

Post by VLM »

jamescun wrote: post #5

I was discussing an identical project with a coworker a while back, and have been stalking ebay for VT2X0s occasionally since. However they seem to be incredibly rare in the UK, and all the listings shown require shipping from the US with monstrous fees. Although my idea was not necessarily integration in to my work flow, more a dashboard of network/server stats etc.

Hang out with the retrocomputing people. Also to some extent the ham radio people, at least some of them.

The business model for the $200 Wyse-60 is OMG our CNC milling machine's terminal is down and every day of production we miss on the missile contract costs us $50K, so I don't care how much it costs, ship one here by tomorrow morning, etc etc. Or you can haul away a Wyse-60 for free because the previous owner won't have to pay electronic recycling fee. That's the model I have. Its pretty nice for a dumb terminal.

Aside from plugging into a linux box and having another cheap screen for scrolling logs or whatever, I mostly use it for exotic hardware. Software terminals are generally not as compatible as hardware terminals (despite hardware terminals mostly being SBCs with exotic firmware) and if a hardware fault puts 220V on a connector and vaporizes my "free" terminal I'll be much less unhappy than if it vaporized my expensive main computer or even a rasp-pi. Also they boot very quickly, 3 seconds from flip the power to work, whereas a "modern advanced" computer takes maybe 5-10 minutes. So from a stopped condition, "I just wanna know if this PLC is alive or dead" can be answered in 6 seconds instead of 6 minutes.

Given that you can haul them away for free, depending how many dumb mistakes I make, I have roughly a lifetime supply.

Restoration of old hardware can be entertaining as a hobby in itself, I have to rip out the (inevitably leaking) dead nicads and replace them with a diode and dual AA battery holder, at least on my Wyse-60's.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#115

Post by fit2rule »

nickpeterson wrote: post #32
paulmd wrote: post #30

Quasi-related: I've always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they're not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power. So far the easiest approach I've found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into…

Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...

See Chapter Nine:

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/pocorgtfo11.pdf

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#116

Post by technofiend »

mrbill wrote: post #3

I feel old; I used a Wyse 320 and later a VT220 as my sole / main IO device in 1995-96 - connected to a SPARCstation 10 via a multi-port serial box at 9600 baud, with heavy use of GNU Screen. Even now, I still use a variation on that - a tall terminal window, ssh, and screen - for the majority of my work.

LOL. What's old is new again, mate. When I worked at Shell in 1989 and 1990 we were going to throw out Sun 3 desktops as underpowered and useless. Instead I convinced them to recycle the 3/50s and 3/60s as X terminals by replacing init and booting straight into X. You could use local X terms and telnet (ssh? what's that?) to systems, but we found it was faster to use XDM and supply the desktop from a server like a Sun 4/280.

I would kill to have a modern-day equivalent of the native UNIX desktop I had on a 4/110 after we ditched the 3/50's: the system had two frame buffers and you could switch between desktops by crossing the desktop boundary in any direction. Probably easier to just use two screens these days but at the time that meant putting two extremely large and deep CRTs on your desk.

Here we are 25 years later and xterm+ssh is still the easiest way to get my UNIX work done even if everything else (e-mail, productivity apps) is in Windows. Where's my modern-day NCD X terminal equivalent and unix desktop?

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#117

Post by rbanffy »

Cieplak wrote: post #42
nickpeterson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...

Funny you bring that up, I was just reading about this: When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript, or DPS. DPS added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functio…

There is something interesting (if you can say "interesting" to the idea of writing, say, an e-mail client in PostScript):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#119

Post by rdancer »

mikekchar wrote: post #109
grkvlt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, over 50ms is high latency now? That's less than transatlantic traffic delays, for example. I think you have to be in the actually noticeable (say 250ms plus) range to count as high.

Not to sounds like a Monty Python skit, but 50ms really does seem like luxury to me :-). I guess to back up the OP's point, I regularly use vim over 250ms+ latency lines for hours on end. It's not fantastic, but it's definitely doable. You need to have your vim golf game up to par, though :-)

You know your latency is high when your mental model switches from vi(1) to ed(1).

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#120

Post by shmerl »

ricksplat wrote: post #102
mark-r wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those examples all seem to have excessive bleed from the bright areas. If those were physical devices, I'd be turning down the brightness control immediately. Anybody come up with a version for iOS or Android yet? Seeing it on a tablet would be a real juxtaposition.

Is there a windows one?

Not sure. Since it's based on Qt it can be possible to build it I suppose.
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