1980 Terminal with Linux - TeleVideo 950

[@Xarius86]

It actually kind of makes sense that the "back space" goes back a space, and the "delete" key actually deletes a character.

[@user-fh2fm7vr4m]

This is my experience with AS/400 as well, at least thru terminal emulators.

[@southernflatland]

back space backs a space delete key deletes a key Gotcha 👍

[@randomdesign6304]

That's how they worked back in the day, including on DEC VT terminals. So it's not a weird mapping, it's correct by design.

[@deang5622]

Backspace goes back a single character, not a space.

[@tramadol42]

​@@randomdesign6304 Absolutely, it went so far that on the keyboard of my good old Siemens terminal, the key has a double label: "Backspace / Backstep". Together with the Shift key, it sends the code for "Delete".

[@Dinnye01]

Shelby, you are like a drop of water in a desert. While a lot of your videos may not have any effect on my life, but it is always lovely to listen to your voice and wisdom.

[@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger]

"you are like a drop of water in a desert" Insignificant?

[@Dinnye01]

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger Don't be an asshole. This is a reference of the opposite: when a drop of water means the world.

[@RadikAlice]

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger Complete opposite actually

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@Throckmorton.Scribblemonger I presume they meant a drop of water for a person in the desert, not just water in the desert in isolation :P

[@Foobar_The_Fat_Penguin]

22:41: Just for the record: SystemD is event driven, so you can actually configure the units to only start agetty when the USB adapter is plugged in. It's also possible to use udev to do that but going via SystemD might be more elegant. Of course, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to go through that hassle for a one-off presentation.

[@hobbified]

The events are coing from udev either way, it's just a question of whether it works better for you to have udev do a thing, or have udev tell systemd to do a thing.

[@johndododoe1411]

SystemD is decades removed from traditional POSIX/Unix systems that were born for serial and considered the local PC as just a serial terminal sharing some of the computer hardware. I'm old enough to have used the original tools on Linux machines with no local screen at all. I have also used a real terminal connected to a VAX .

[@AddicteServer]

And there is a pre configured one "agetty@ttyS0 or getty@ttyS0"

[@TheGreatAtario]

Very early in my programming career, it became my job to write terminfo files for clients to be able to use our product's Unix version with all the formatting and whatnot that could be mustered on whatever hardware they bought, since the built-in ones were either insufficient, wrong, or missing entirely. And a short while before that, I had used many different hardware terminals in college, where the TVI950 was a staple. Big nostalgia here!

[@ChrisGonnerman]

Yeah, I wrote termcap and terminfo files for various terminals on a variety of mid to late '80's Unix systems. That was... fun... for some definition of fun anyway. Never used a TVI950 but spent a lot of hours programming a Motorola 68000-based computer using a Motorola M220 terminal. Even played around (in off duty time) with reloading character sets.

[@TheGreatAtario]

@@ChrisGonnerman Unix terminfo authorship fistbump!

[@ChrisGonnerman]

@@TheGreatAtario Thanks. Not the most fun things I've done in service to the computers, but neither is it the worst.

[@phiwise_9489]

I love how this video is half "Retro hardware repair" and half "Wizard explains how not to luse with unix; luses anyway". Very aligned to my particular interests!

[@sadmac356]

Same honestly

[@pavman42]

Gotta respect youtubers who pull out a fire extinguisher and prominently display it in their video right before turning something on.

[@ppokorny99]

I disagree with the statement that 25 pin connectors had more flow control. IBM introduced the 9pin version because its smaller and it has all the serial handshake lines that are used for rs-232 communication to modems common in the 80’s. Tx, rx, Cts, rts, dtr, dsr, cd, ring, gnd. The 25 pin connector has other pins defined for synchronous serial clock signals, secondary serial channels, and a bunch of unused or reserved pins. None of which were useful for a pc connected to a common async telephone modem or serial printer.

[@ChrisGonnerman]

Most of the extra signals of the DB25 version weren't used by basically anything by the '80's. Not sure how much they were used before that, as I started college in 1983 and that's when I started getting serial terminal experience. Used to know the main pinouts for a "proper" null modem cable by heart. GND is GND, RX crosses TX, DTR crosses DSR, RTS crosses CTS. Just don't remember the numbers now.

[@MarkyShaw]

This was a great lesson in serial connections in general. I appreciate you sharing all that info about terminfo, termcap, and screen. I was struggling big time with my TRS Model 102 and connecting to a Pi. It worked but I couldn't get the nonsensical characters to go away despite changing term types. The screen trick worked! Now I have another use for screen other than keeping my IRC session running in the background ;-)

[@KnutBluetooth]

There's no fundamental reason why all the features of this terminal do not work with Linux. The termcap definition is just incomplete/wrong. Someone just needed to get some basic stuff working with this terminal and submitted an incomplete/wrong definition and no one has cared ever since. Just like there are tons of non standard keyboards that don't have proper definitions that don't work fully with Linux because no one bothered. Maybe try with a BSD.

[@athompso99]

In general, Linux and the major BSD flavours all share the same ncurses-supplied termcap, so this sadly probably won't make any difference. If you want a proper tvi950 termcap, you might have to go back to the SunOS 4.x era, maybe a 2nd-gen SVR4 system like Unixware. [Source: I am a termcap/terminfo author for several terminals, but not the TVIs.]

[@nickwallette6201]

So true. Linux _seems_ like it has all this support for a huge variety of platforms and modular components, but in reality, if you're not running it on x86 hardware with a modern ANSI-like terminal and a recent GCC with full GNU life support system, well... good luck to you, sir.

[@KnutBluetooth]

@@nickwallette6201 I'd go further and say that Linux only runs well on hardware that is 1) supported by hardware vendor employees that contribute to the kernel 2) hardware that is used by big companies who can pay for employees to fix bugs in the kernel 3) hardware that is used personally by Linux kernel programmers. Outside of that sooner or later, you're out of luck because of the constant code churn in the kernel breaking things without testing on hardware that doesn't fall in the three cases I mentioned. These days Linux crashes all the time on the very same 32-bit hardware where it used to work flawlessly (no regressions with the appropriate Windows, so it isn't a hardware malfunction). I had to buy another damn video card recently because AMD employees that "maintain" Radeon stuff in the kernel do not fix any bugs for perfectly working hardware they deem "too old". On the other hand, I don't think you really need GNU stuff. Alpine with musl/busybox works fine.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@KnutBluetooth That's very true. I have a VIA Epia board that is pretty much unusable on recent x86-32 Linux due to various hard lock-ups and extremely poor throughput on at least the IDE half of a PCI controller card under the sata_promise driver. Also tried to use a Matrox G200 on another older box, figuring that ought to have great driver support. Nope. Completely broken. Just random garbage on the screen. I do love open source projects, but the downside of no official support channel is that code maintenance follows volunteer dopamine.

[@KnutBluetooth]

@@nickwallette6201 Except for hardware vendors who are quick to abandon support for their own stuff, I don't blame them. I'd be even willing to pay a reasonable amount of money so that kernel programmers could be hired publicly to maintain older hardware in Linux. But I'm pretty sure this would be opposed ruthlessly with lobbying just like 'right to repair" laws.

[@CORBARocks]

Watching the terminal setup on Linux reminds me of doing that with a Unix System 3 with 24 serial ports...around 1983. I used to carry a rs232c 25/9 pin breakout box with LEDs and a peg matrix around in my pocket all the time!

[@devttyUSB0]

It seems fitting for me to comment on this video. ;) Terminal types are such a pain in the beehive. Even when you're running 'modern' terminal emulators it still causes pain and confusion if you're working on different systems through SSH. Great video, this! Thanks!

[@retsamyar]

heh for some reason idk if it was because i learned computers in the early 90s as a preteen or what but working through terminals and screens don't cause that much confusion. One of my fond memories is the old internet dialups came with unix shell accounts. That way you can get things fast to your shell from the internet and then slowly download later.

[@JeffreyGroves]

You should be using the `reset` command when changing term types too. You may even need to cycle power on the terminal if the terminal gets really freaked out.

[@widicamdotnet]

Support for 40+ year old serial terminals in Linux is actually surprisingly good, considering much newer stuff has already been thrown out of the mainline kernel. Like 486 CPUs or IrDA adapters...

[@PinguimFU]

Wait irda was also thrown out? 😮

[@JdeBP]

Well strictly speaking the terminfo support isn't anything to do with Linux, as it's not done by the kernel at all. All that Linux deals with is the serial port, and ironically that is _not_ 40 years old. it's a relatively new USB device, which one wouldn't have had 40 years ago. So Linux is supporting a quite recent device, and it's only the non-Linux part of the operating system (Linux being the kernel, of course) that is supporting the 40 year old stuff. Using a PC that has an honest-to-goodness serial port on the mainboard would be more like Linux supporting old stuff. (-:

[@gamagama69]

@@JdeBP i mean a lot of modern motherboards have a serial header through the superio. i have one with a port adapter and im curious if this would work with this. just dont have room for a massive terminal that i realistically have no use for but i kidna really want one to screw around with

[@SLLabsKamilion]

Just wanna point out, DB-25 actually has pinouts for two full serial ports and all the control lines. Most of the time the second port went unused; so it was reduced to the DB-9 we are more familiar with today.

[@Graham_Rule]

I'd forgotten about termcap and terminfo. Way back in the 1980's I supported an equivalent system for a locally developed operating system so knew far more than was sane about the escape sequences of the 30 or so terminal types we supported. I feel old.

[@liamwatson5125]

I just love hearing that beeping the terminal makes when you type. Such a soothing sound. Dot matrix printers always shake the table as a result of particle transfer to the surface.

[@MegaManNeo]

screen was actually the first thing on my mind when you mentioned those character issues as I know it can fix those when set properly. It may have been struggling for you but me as a viewer, these old terminals look freaking awesome!

[@FinnBojorgensen]

Lovely ! Brings me back to the good old days when VT100 was the state of art and I had to play with termcap entries, escape sequences etc. I suppose that many of your younger followers were somewhat puzzled by all the techspeak, but to me, it brought back fond memories.

[@petersnape1537]

back in the 70's and 80's we used to say that RS232 was just another name for Murphy's Law

[@afshinrohani]

Your videos bring me immense joy. Even in areas that aren't my specific interest. Your dedication and care is rewarding within itself.

[@esra_erimez]

I would love to get a vintage terminal like this and use a Raspberry Pi booting to serial. The irony is that how powerful and small the Pi is compared to the computers this terminal connected to when it was in its prime.

[@Sylvan_dB]

Could easily find room inside the terminal to mount the Pi. Just keep it away from the high voltage. With a bit more work you could use the Pi's built-in TTL serial direct to the terminal (bypassign the RS232 level conversion in the terminal) but you'd need to protect the Pi against the (probably) 5v TTL serial in the terminal.

[@samuraidriver4x4]

That's what Shelby did with another terminal. Works pretty good and there should be a video of it I think.

[@fuzzywzhe]

No you wouldn't want this. What would you do with it? A raspberry pi is as powerful as the Unix mainframe I was on in 1990. Why would you want to use this terminal? This terminal was designed for monochromatic graphical display. Did he even demonstrate that? If you want an "old style terminal", get a VT-220. That's just a 80x24 colum display (was it that? Something like that..) There was the VT-100 as well, but I hated working on them, they had lower resolution to draw the characters, much harder on your eyes. This terminal is not something you'd want to try to use. The backspace key, ALONE, makes is entirely frustrating to use. We had a bunch in college, but the only thing people used this for was to show pictures, then log off. I never once saw a person working on one. They were replaced by the NCD X terminals which were just dumb terminals that ran X11 in them, designed to be black and white - they were usable but I don't even know if they would be compatible with modern X11. You could, conceivably (?) run an NCD against a raspberry pi, but I'd check first. Those would be entirely usable if they are compatible with currently X11. And you don't want to go back to 1990 anyhow. You really don't. All of this stuff was neat at the time, but it's downright primitive today.

[@esra_erimez]

@@fuzzywzhe Yes. Yes, I would. Its the physical personification of putty

[@fuzzywzhe]

@@esra_erimez Why would anybody want to use putty? When I think about it, I'm not even certain this terminal is entirely compatible with the VT100 character escape sequences to allow you to run an editor like VI or Emacs on it. Maybe Ed. These sequences are necessary to position the cursor. Good lord, I'd never want to go back to stone knives and bear skins again. I used to be quite expert with the VT220. You could reprogram the font. Somebody used a program I wrote to make a video game, I think it was one of those pipeflow games. Interesting, somebody made BoulderDash on the machines, but they didn't use my program to do it, however I used my program to recode their version of BoulderDash to run on a VT100.

[@DasIllu]

I did something like this with a Zenith EasyPC 20 years ago. That thing had barely more cpu power than a terminal. It only had a "mouse port". Well, it actually was a serial port with a lot of stripped pins of D9 connector. Configuration was a lot easier since i could just use a dos terminal program. Midnight Commander was the end boss when battling code pages and terminal configs. In the end it really looked like a terminal from the mid to late 80s. With Lynx i could even browse the web (back then it was easier).

[@RocketCityTech]

It is absolutely amazing that this series of serial adapters can interface with USB and therefore a modern computer, especially given the age of this hardware. Truly amazing!

[@TastyBusiness]

Man, that thing is filthy. Excellent practical demonstration of the capacitor reforming decision tree. I wasn't expecting to see a 6502 family of parts in there. CRT cataracts are the degradation/oxidization of the epoxy layer between the safety layer and the glass of the CRT itself, rather than mold. Great video, glad to see the TV950 in action!

[@mahtism]

11:12 I relate to this "YES!" When you fix something and it works, there is no greater feeling.

[@valeinikofff]

thank you! it immersed me in 1980s, totally (like, reliving the past).

[@cnvogel]

Fun fact: the old televideo terminals were used in the video War Games :) (I checked the rom dump of a 912 and built a PC font from it, it’s identical)

[@frugalprepper]

I remember back in the day, I used to work with serial communication all the time on AIX and HP, System V and HP-UX. I also did a lot of CNC machines in shops. I was the serial master. I remember one tech had been at a customer for a week trying to get a Fiber Serial MUX working on a AIX it basically took 16 Serials to dumb terminals over Multimode fiber to another building. Back in the day before IP and Telnet were really a thing. I had it working in about 2hrs. Had to loop 4 and 5 and 6,8.20, set it up for software flow control. I still have my breakout box. Every once in a while it still comes in handy.

[@alexcrow2905]

That keyboard sounds amazing!

[@harveyellis6758]

I have lots of memories working with old terminals. I had 6502 based terminal in my garage (with colour capability) in mid 1990's. It was connected via serial to PC in house running a Slackware distribution of Linux. Lots of hours spent with termcap, configurations, and trying to get terminal compatibility to present data correctly on the crt.

[@retrozmachine1189]

Terminal printing isn't something I've even thought about for far too many years to mention. If done properly a long print job could be interleaved with normal user activities rather than occupying the terminal with printing for the whole duration of the job. At least in my experience printers were usually on their own separate serial port from the mux or host rather than the terminal.

[@2Fast4Mellow]

The best thing about 70s and 80s electronics is that most was build with serviceability in mind. You can still find a lot of computer hardware from the 80s, but also audio components. Screen is indeed a wonderful utility, especially over an unreliable connection, as you can reconnect to a disconnected session (-r -d) and continue as nothing happened...

[@mnoxman]

the widzard incantation for setting your 'back space' key is: "stty erase " also when you set your TERM you should export it. e.g. $ export TERM=tvi-950

[@heraldb.1077]

I've been trying to do this exact same thing with my Televideo 950 and ran into these same issues and gave up! Thank you so much!

[@shmehfleh3115]

Also, in almost all cases, control-H works as a backspace. It even works in Apple II Basic.

[@johndododoe1411]

That's because backspace is ASCII character 8, so on anything resembling a serial terminal, it's the same as sending the 8th control code via ctrl-H . Similarly delete is character 127 (which makes a lot more sense when using 7-hole punched tape to write teletype messages to be sent directly to another terminal over a pay-per-minute phone line. The huge problem is that someone in the early days of Linux swapped the two ASCII codes and insisted their nonsense was the correct behavior for the local Linux console.

[@hawksights]

When manufacturers still had confidence in their customers

[@professorpwerrel]

For real, that manual is evidence that the right to repair has been eaten away at. For companies like Apple, their main argument is essentially that people are too stupid and will end up hurting themselves. So how much are they trying to say humanity has deteriorated since the 80s?

[@Okurka.]

These were sold to professionals.

[@EssenceofPureFlavor]

Yeah, I don't think that's really it as much as it is the intended market.

[@EngineerOfChaos]

@@Okurka. While true, even now things are much more sanitized to make it easy.

[@ByronGoodman]

Systems came with getty configured already. They typically would auto-discover the terminal, unless someone forced it (we did have scripts). They were very simple to setup. He is kinda doing things very backwards compared to how we did it in the 80s. inittab would spawn the serial sessions. I don't miss the days of abusing wall, and .plan files. I could never go back to writing code on one of these. You lived in emacs, and emacs was your 'screen', or 'tmux'. I still use emacs today, but it is painful over a serial port.

[@retrozmachine1189]

termcaps are fun. I had to keep a suite of cobol programs working under linux for many years. For what ever reason the authors had hard coded it to work with SCO-ANSI only and the SCO-ANSI that was available for linux was incomplete at the time. Fortunately I had a copy of SCO, the suite was originally targetted at SCO, and was able to swipe the file from there.

[@CORBARocks]

I love your channel, because I used some of the old kit you so diligently restore. Now a days who under 30 understands hardware flow control?!

[@cfg83]

This is gorgeous! I can't say for sure, but I think that I programmed C for the first time on a TV950 @ UCLA in the PIC (Programming In Computing?!?!) class back in 1985. It was definitely the classic green on black screen. It was attached to a Unix server. Parking was free after 9 PM, so I would drive in and program late into the night. Hmmmm, I guess nothing has really changed, :) . I am sooooo happy you made this video. Even if it's not the exact model I used, it's one of its brethren and deserves to be cherished.

[@no1leader135]

Cool video, 6502, 6522 and two 6551 and Linux. Perfetto.

[@geraldweinsack5500]

Well done! I was doing my job on TERM=pf and vt100. Many odd reactions when set to the wrong one in .profile. I used UNIX System V on a Perkin-Elmer 3210 minicomputer, which had 9 terminals, a console, 1 line printer, 1 plotter and an 8" double floppy disk station. The hard drive had one permanent and one removable spindle, each holding 16MB of data. The RAM had about 4 MB. A program, written in C, only i++ing up to 100K on a longint took only ONE second to run. ---=== This was one year before 1984 ===--- Greetings to all of you ...

[@MrBrianms]

You could make an executable launch when you press the key. The screen memory sends to printer memory without the program appearing on the screen "echo off". I remember this program had to be in the DOS ready to run. It was great to magnify graphics onto the dot-matrix printer with simple multiplication. It was a BBC Model B with no print screen facility. A long long time ago...

[@FinnbogiRagnarRagnarsson]

I used to know a lot of tty commands to get the terminal I was in front of to behave. Often needed even though settings were 'correct'. Typed them in without needing to think. Those were the days. But what was most impressive was IBM block-mode terminals (e.g. 3270) used on the mainframes. Made data entry and data entry programming so easy.

[@goddessesstartrekonlinefle3061]

A childhool dream just came true lol. Thanks for taking the time to make this video happen (even if it IS massively impractical); I agree it's super cool to have a dumb terminal you can use in the modern age. I still hope one day to find and setup a last generation VAX dumb terminal, I first encountered those as a short term "intern" at Pilkingtons Glass and they inspired me (smooth scrolling and basic windowing in a terminal! Crazy good).

[@elpiibemaravilla]

i really like all the passion that you put through this

[@beatadalhagen]

I love the beep. Had one of these with a modem in 1995. If not this exact model, then close. Ah, the days of Gopher and Annex.

[@oliverw.douglas285]

Reminds me of the DEC VT100 Series of Terminals. Very similar in many regards.

[@KpxUrz5745]

Wish I had this guy's knowledge. I saved all my early computers, printers, etc, and in much better shape than in the barn like here! I have this same Televideo 950, and plenty of other stuff, including a very early heavy and expensive S-100 CP/M system, even massive heavy 8" floppy drives in a frame weighing at least 80 pounds. It would be fun to get some old stuff working again.

[@obiwanbenobi4943]

Reminds me of the good old days when I made a null modem cable using a male and female serial port connectors and a piece of telephone cable, match light solder and paper clips as jumpers where needed. It worked well enough to transfer my files, but after that I didn't need that cable again for 15 years and I finally sent all my old parts to the recyling people to do what they could with it all. Cleared out an entire closet full of old machines and parts. The stty command can be used to examine and change the baud, etc. settings on a serial connection.

[@snap_oversteer]

Vintge terminals and modern Linux/BSD are always fun, yours seems to be very usable for 1980 vintage. I've successfully tried to connect old 70s Tektronix 4006 vector terminal to my desktop and it kinda worked, there are luckily still few tools that can plot in the Tek format, but biggest problem usability wise is the lack of lowercase keys.

[@litebkt]

I used a Sherry Univac monitor with the S100 machine I wire wrapped in 1978. I later got a Televideo monitor and loved it.

[@Psychlist1972]

I normally hate artificial keyclick sounds, but the beep on this one is dreamy :)

[@liamwatson5125]

I can’t get enough of that beeping either.

[@shiroshine7227]

It sorta reminds me of my Amdek color 1 monitor with the black frame. I like how the keyboard can tuck away a bit to look like a single unit. Very tidy.

[@rochr4]

I am looking at my alacritty, tmux and gazillion of tools and hacks that I use to make it all comfortable and fast and actually irreplaceable with even more appreciation now, thanks! :)

[@oqibidipo]

To stop bash inserting those ?2004 things add these lines to /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc $if term=tvi950 set enable-bracketed-paste off $endif

[@Mike-mu7tk]

Control-H is the "escape code" that does delete. If your terminal isn't mapped properly. That usually works

[@JdeBP]

One really cannot call something an "escape code" if there's no ESC in it. It is a _control character_ . (-:

[@AndyHullMcPenguin]

Back in the day, we had a customer that ran a scrap metal business. Every time we went there, the terminals looked just as dirty as the one you found in the barn. We would clean everything (including on one occasion cleaning a huge number of ants out of the main Altos Unix system), and get it all looking pretty again, only to have to repeat the process a few months later. We used to use a foaming cleaner called Amberclens Anti-Static Foaming Cleaner (which still exists). It came in an aerosol can, and would clean anything off anything. I have no idea what the hazmat sheet looks like for the stuff, but is sure as heck does the trick.

[@thenathanhaines]

Anthill Inside!

[@paulbrantley5212]

Printer passthrough is what I recall it being called under SCO Unix in the 90s when I first knew about the terminals having addressable printers attached.

[@dx9s]

HEY.. used those terminals at college.. Forget the name of the Unix (it was AT&T licensed), but called Prime something, think it has S-100 bus. Used for teaching classes how to write/compile C and Fortran programs, and has some SQL (think it was Postgresql) on it. Brings back memories.

[@PunchysGameRoom]

Great job cleaning that thing man, looks incredible!

[@earl4989]

I remember terminals like that one at video stores, back in the early 1980s. They constantly made that beeping noise, then the whine of a dot-matrix printer that would print out the carbonless receipt that we had to sign.

[@thomasrichard7054]

Very nice video, bringing back memories of my student days in the 90s when I got a TeleVideo TVI925 for a chocolate bar. Attached it to my 486 box running Debian (1.3.1 and later 2.0) with a 9/25 adapter and a 9-pin nullmodem cable. I recall enabling agetty /dev/ttyS1 in /etc/inittab, and that was pretty much all I needed. The terminfo file supported tvi925, and I did not run screen here. Well, the serial terminal was meant to serve as a fallback when screwing up XFree86 configs, but I actually never needed it.

[@mortwin6054]

i like the look of the keyboard they a good bit of room in the terminal good accesses 😀

[@Tweaker420666]

This was in my recommendations and was actually spot on. Subbed and rung.

[@ygstuff4898]

Memories on having a parade of serial adapters plugged into each other. How many times I used to do that, when trying to connect two "standard" technologies to each other (haha).

[@c1ph3rpunk]

There were standards, problem is they’re mostly telecom and MIS folks generally ignored anything “those phone people” did. When you have a terminal connected to a modem, that dialed into the host, the path makes sense.

[@MarshallGates]

I remember using the TeleVideo terminals along with the CP/M system they had.

[@WildkatPhoto]

Back in High School all I wanted was a Digital VT100 and a CPM system. Good times.

[@BrianJurkowski]

What an awesome trip down memory lane. Thanks for sharing this! If you ever want to sell one of those terminals, let me know! I'm in the market for a vintage terminal. I would love that retro-computing vibe when working on the Linux command line!

[@paulstubbs7678]

Nice terminal, although not being VT100 is a problem these days. I've been looking for a terminal for ages, nothing in my neck of the woods. Serial is not that hard, you just have to get used to what DTE & DCE is all about, and how it was used back then, although I have a bit of an advantage, spending my early working years at a telco fixing terminals & modems.

[@rommix0]

> although not being VT100 is a problem these days. Anything not based on DEC terminals would be an issue. That's for sure.

[@GBS1043]

Wish I had a dollar for every VT100 I installed

[@deang5622]

DCE and DTE is simply terminology for each end of the serial link. It'a the control lines you need to get your head around and which particular ones are being used. For example, CTS, RTS. Or DTR, DSR. It's identifying which flow control mechanism is in use and which signal lines and how they behave.

[@paulstubbs7678]

@@deang5622 Yes that can be a real challenge, as these lines kind of get repurposed, and referring to older documentation on serial can lead you astray as the modern use quite often treats them as general purpose I/O lines, the only bit relevant sometimes is whether they are inputs or outputs.

[@pkneeyahx]

How can you get anything done with those two Hydro Thunders in there! Lol

[@MileZero313]

Lmao so true

[@zeusde86]

I'm pretty convinced, that you can avoid agetty completely and use screen directly, as it accepts tty-devices as inputs just like `screen /dev/ttyUSB0` (plus terminal-mode options of course). I always use it like this when using serial-output from microcontrollers and such. beside that, you can configure screen to not show it's start-screen, that you have to bypass by pressing enter (which is default on only some distros).

[@xhausted110]

Try typing stty erase That usually works for me.

[@tali3san337]

Man I remember using screen when running an ISP (using modems) in the 90's. Fun times.

[@DavidHembrow]

Interesting to see this. Back in the 80s i did a lot of typing on the keyboards of Televideo 910 & 925 terminals. Never saw a 950.

[@dustinsmous5413]

I have a Televideo 905 that I still use on a daily basis on my linux system! Televideo terminals are definitely built to last!

[@shamon351]

11:20 what is your keyboard ? I love that there are so many macro buttons !

[@dave7244]

When you opened it up. TBH it didn't look too bad. Sure there was a lot of dust and dirt. But there didn't seem to be any corrosion which would be my biggest worry with a piece of equpment kept in less than Ideal conditions.

[@tschak909]

It was common to use the printer port on these terminals (and ADM-3A's and the like) to attach to "development boxes" which could accept Intel hex data to send to a ROM emulation circuit. Atari and many game companies did just this to send the output of a cross-assembler to the testing hardware.

[@cedwardmassey]

15:16 you may confuse people by saying that the monitor has an 80×24 column display. To avoid potential confusion, you could call the horizontal "columns" "rows" instead.

[@nanopone]

the snap folder in your home folder gave me shivers..

[@bloepje]

I had one of those (next to a lot of other terminals) for years on my many serial only systems. I actually wanted a 955, and all I got was this 950 and 920C. Bought them from school. I used to work on school on these. 96 people working at the same time on the same computer with 2MB ram, which was a lot. Doing "excel" and stuff. Never was a problem.

[@ropersonline]

16:50: The Atari ST also beeped in acknowledgement of every keypress. Not the Ellen Feiss kind of beep-beep-beeps, but ye olde _"Roger, wilco, I have registered your keypress and will act accordingly, yes siree!"_ kind of beeps.

[@thevintageaudiolife]

Thanks for posting these videos, i really enjoy them.

[@supercompooper]

I loved the televideo. I wrote a bbs for amiga that supported those and the vt100's

[@TheSlackOne]

Lovely video. Thanks!

[@billmiller4800]

The screen util is removing all escape characters, input and output. If you can turn off the colour in the terminal (like LS_COLORS for Ls), the terminal will work fine without screen.

[@6581punk]

I like how it makes a Pong type beep when you type.

[@safi164]

Shelby always does cool projects

[@Bowa10000]

Two of the issues are actually related quite significantly, those being the random "m"s and lack of highlighting. This is because terminal text is formatted with ANSI escape sequences, specifically for this case: Select Graphic Rendition (SGR), which is formatted as "\e[ n m" where "n" is a number or number sequence, and "m" is the literal "m" character. My guess is the terminal is incorrectly ignoring parts of some SGR sequences, stripping out everything but the terminator, whereas Screen strips out all SGR sequences for compatibility (hence removal of all formatting and the random "m"s).

[@scooter4196]

We used IBM TTYs for interacting with AIX machines. Prior to that we had a mainframe.

[@branscombe_]

my ibm pc jr had a telecommunications disk with a modem back in 1988

[@JC-tf9wo]

I have a Wyse 60 in my garage for 25 years. Turned it on tonight after cleaning it up and it powered right up. Characters a bit fuzzy cleared up in 10 minutes. Ran it for two hours no problem. However I followed your instruction and can’t get it to work. I know the terminal works as I can adjust settings. And my Linux box is recognizing the usb port for TTY. Not sure if there is a setting on the Wyse causing the issue or what. More tinkering to come.

[@davidmoore4567]

To change the back space character try using stty erase. Hopefully the commands for clear, vi and Emacs should work perfect as these will make use of the term variable, make sure display is unset. I did not use this model but the 925 with a Spiderport that used to connect to both Sun OS and Primos systems when I was studying. Obviously I preferred the Prime Pt220 and Dec Vt320 and vt340 terminals to this one. If you even need to connect to the Serial port of an old Sun system the default is 9600, 7 bits, even parity with xon/xoff and if connected to the console do not press the break key if you have one as that will bring up the open boot or old mode prompts depending on the setting

[@JimmyCall]

I can recall the terminals in past workplaces had config pages. Can't remember how to display them. Maybe on more modern terminal units and brands.

[@clangerbasher]

I have used an Atari ST with VT100 cartridge and Linux for IRC. Lot of fun.

[@Sylvan_dB]

Those Televideo 950's were awesome terminals back in the day. Then Wyse finally one-upped them just as character terminals were on the way out.

[@anvz6]

As I remember. Printing on Unix is simple. You send a command to the terminal (^P in general) and it instructs the terminal to forward everything it receives in serial port, to printer port. ^N ends this behavior and resumes the normal operation. Then. The wen you print a file, rh spool program formats the output and sends it to a script indicating the destination printer. This script knows that this printer is attached to some terminal and knows it's serial port. So it sends ^P to this serial port followed by the print data and a ^N. This means you can send print jobs to any slave printer on any terminal. The only problem is that during the print the screen is frozen.

[@Akselmoi]

This is super cool, I've always wanted to learn more of these "dumb terminals." I wonder if it would be possible to somehow pipe Doom through somekind of video-to-ASCII thing and then show and play it on that terminal?

[@amartini51]

Probably not. Back then, memory was super expensive so it was typical to store only the ASCII characters in RAM and use a dedicated chip called a character generator to turn each ASCII character into the bitmapped image while drawing the screen. So this terminal doesn’t even have video RAM that you could render Doom into. However some terminal could do graphics via “sixel mode” or vector drawing.

[@highpath4776]

@@amartini51 Petsci Robots ?!

[@RuiMartins]

@@amartini51 It seems you didn't get the "video-to-ASCII" part of the message.

[@Ice_Karma]

The `stty` command should help you with the backspace and delete thing.

[@matteo1429]

"Hello, Professor Falkien" - Man I love this feeling!!