21–30 of 55 posts
Fantastic. My favourite terminal I worked on was the amber-colored vt320 hooked to a sun box and sometimes to an sgi. There was something special to it, even 'back in the day'.
We need the VT52 experience: relay clicks as you type.
Reminds me a bit of a weekend project I did a few years back: When I was about 6, my dad went out and bought what would be the family computer for half a decade, a TI-99/4a. The thing that stuck in my craw was that even though Apple and Commodore had mastered the lowercase Latin font, the lowercase letters on the TI were just tiny uppercase ones. So flash forward 25 years or so, and I'd downloaded a TI-99 emulator to…
Perhaps it was an early example of the DRY mantra being applied incorrectly.
We need the VT52 experience: relay clicks as you type.
Some of IBM's mainframe terminals used a solenoid which would hit the side of the keyboard's case to indicate that a key-press was successfuly registered. This was in addition to the well documented clicking noise of IBM's keyboard switches.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of IBM's mainframe terminals used a solenoid which would hit the side of the keyboard's case to indicate that a key-press was successfuly registered. This was in addition to the well documented clicking noise of IBM's keyboard switches.
IIRC original 3270 keyboard had solenoid that physically prevented user from pressing any key when the terminal was busy and would not be able to register the key press.
To the best of my knowledge, the only IBM keyboards that could flat out prevent the keys from being pressed were ones based on the Selectric typewriter mechanism, such as the 2741
Reminds me a bit of a weekend project I did a few years back: When I was about 6, my dad went out and bought what would be the family computer for half a decade, a TI-99/4a. The thing that stuck in my craw was that even though Apple and Commodore had mastered the lowercase Latin font, the lowercase letters on the TI were just tiny uppercase ones. So flash forward 25 years or so, and I'd downloaded a TI-99 emulator to…
I don't know either, however TI at the time also produced the "Silent 700" terminal series and it had the same font (all essentially upper case characters just some larger and some smaller. Perhaps it was an early example of the DRY mantra being applied incorrectly.
this is great! I'm a regular user of the glasstty font + the 'tritty'[1] utility which emulates serial line I/O to create the 'true unix terminal' experience. Looking forward to the next post! ps: improved smeary-220 font would be great :b .. [1] https://github.com/sjmulder/trickle
Interesting post. From my work on 1980s micros that used CRT TVs for display, the phosphor response described here seems to be a bit oversimplified. In my purely subjective experience, rise time seems to be shorter than fall time - pixels will usually be visibly blurred on the trailing (right) edge, but sharper on the leading (left) edge. Another thing I noticed is that a longer horizontal row of pixels will leave a…
The slow decay of the phosphors is on an entirely different timescale: more on the order of the time taken to refresh the entire screen, rather than the time taken for the e-beam to sweep across a single pixel. The asymmetry in the phosphor's activation vs decay is vastly greater than the asymmetry in the electron gun's switching on and off.
Reminds me a bit of a weekend project I did a few years back: When I was about 6, my dad went out and bought what would be the family computer for half a decade, a TI-99/4a. The thing that stuck in my craw was that even though Apple and Commodore had mastered the lowercase Latin font, the lowercase letters on the TI were just tiny uppercase ones. So flash forward 25 years or so, and I'd downloaded a TI-99 emulator to…
It appears to be a 5x7 font, which would mean little room to work in.