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Integrating a VT220 into my life

drewdevault.com

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Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#31

Post by creshal »

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…

I'd really love to have one or five of those for maintenance work. There's a lot of devices that I don't really need to have a keyboard and video connected to for 99.99% of their life time, but I still need an LC display and KVM switch connected to for about 10 minutes per decade. It's such a waste.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#32

Post by nickpeterson »

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...

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#33

Post by threeio »

I've had a handful of these over the years, initially in my home racks and workstation, later migrating to my datacenter so I had an always on stats screen showing traffic, alerts, etc.

+1 for good tmux'ing your output.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#34

Post by Bud »

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…

Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#37

Post by paulmd »

Bud wrote: post #34
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…

Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?

I actually found a video of a Kindle being used as a terminal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymei7UwBgX4

Looks like it's running a pretend-terminal website which probably explains the latency (the Kindle does not have a fast processor).

Way on the other end - here's a Dasung 13.3" eInk monitor (i.e. you feed it DVI and it handles all the display driving for you). It can be yours for a cool $1000. I'll pass, but it's looking pretty good even for GUI usage. Probably uses more power than a purely embedded solution could, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vny-JTpt-aU

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#38

Post by julian55 »

tacon wrote: post #19

I spent many allnighters on a Datapoint 3300 with TECO as the editor in the early '70s. http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mainframe-computer...

I used to use a VT52 and TECO, later replaced by a VT100. The smooth scrolling seemed impressive at the time. Not long after that I moved into embedded software and wrote firmware to emulate these terminals, mostly in Z80 assembler.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#39

Post by akamaka »

Bud wrote: post #34
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…

Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?

No idea about the refresh rate of eInk displays, but terminals were always designed to work over slow connections. So long as your configuration is pretty traditional (e.g. your text editor scrolling half a page at a time instead of line by line), it should be quite usable by 1970s standards.

Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life

#40

Post by hga »

The Ann Arbor Ambassador was the ne plus ultra at the end of that age, it did up to 60 lines of 80 characters, had the fancy features to minimize data transfer, and could do it all at 9600 baud. The VT220 was a nice evolution of the clunky VT100, but there wasn't a vast difference from, say, the VT52 to it, besides the extra commands that allowed minimizing data transfer (at the cost of rather hairy redisplay code).
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