Digital VT220 Terminal meets a Raspberry Pi

[@MrLurchsThings]

For everyone who has asked about putting the Pi inside the VT, the reason I didn’t was primary because the video was more about the connection and set up rather than a full install. Also that particular Pi4 gets used for all kinds of things. In saying that however, it’s not something *I* would want. Having both the Pi but more importantly the SDCard stick inside isn’t something I’m a fan of.

[@ChrisCebelenski]

Heat would have been a problem too with the VT220 generating more than PI itself. I don't recall the circuits being too hot, but the CRT does get toasty.

[@sarkybugger5009]

Handy Linux hint #36: "Sudo !!" will repeat the last typed command, with added sudo power.

[@claudiusraphael9423]

@@sarkybugger5009 Should be taught in general, as it would allow to prevent many problems with misspelled commands which you need to run via sudo to be effective while they do not need to be run elevated to try it out/let it parse, when using one you are not used to. Wow, what a sentence ...

[@stevepoling]

@@ChrisCebelenski in addition to the thermal issue, there's all the high voltages inside every CRT cabinet to worry about.

[@ropersonline]

I have very strong feelings about this, and they are that putting the Pi inside is something only a retrocomputing fan would suggest who wasn't around at the time and has a very incomplete understanding of what this used to be like and what it used to be all about. You're quite right not to want that. That said, re. 10:10: "It doesn't do any of the fancy ASCII characters."

[@BigCar2]

A great walk down memory lane. I programmed my way through my Computer Science degree on one of these. Weird to think that Raspberry Pi is more powerful than the VAX minicomputer we had connected to the 100-200 terminals.

[@theimp67]

We had a Vax 11/780 when I was at college. Didn't the VT220 support smooth scroll? I always used to turn that on.

[@BigCar2]

@@theimp67 It's too long since I used it to remember!

[@willgilliam9053]

@@theimp67 Isn't the Pi Pico also?

[@wisteela]

@@theimp67 It has the option, yes. I noted smooth scroll was off in the vid.

[@ksbs2036]

@@theimp67 I also programmed BSD Unix on my VT220 connected to a vax11/780. I remember the day when I was upgraded to 19.2kbaud connection from 9600 :-) Fast. I was never a fan of smooth scroll though, so I always turned it off. Different tastes.

[@parrottm76262]

I'll never forget configuring my first multi-VT terminal install at work many decades ago. The users were tickled pink that it worked and they no longer had to time-share the single console.

[@alliejr]

DEC Rainbow circa 1985ish. Early (sorta) PC compatible running MS-DOS... but had a hidden trick where it would boot into VT220 emulation when an OS floppy disc was not present.

[@GORF_EMPIRE]

Terminals are still more fun than today's internet. I think what makes such connecting so enjoyable is the lack of pictures or ever getting to see the other folks on the other side of the connection. Leaves one to use their imagination ..... which is why I love retro classic consoles and micros.

[@elfenmagix8173]

One of the coolest things I have seen. Now part 2 - run a BBS on a Raspberry Pi!

[@craigl8690]

I have one of those...also a VT100 and a VT103....I worked for the company for 33 years and used to fix those things...

[@joefrisco]

All that is needed is a USB to RS232 board, a connection to the RX/TX pins on the PI, a connection to another machine running MINICOM, if Linux and you can watch you boot and kernel boot. The same setup can be used to watch audio video receivers boot.

[@giovannipirozzi]

Great video, I used this terminal model in the 80s for work and seeing it in action is a great emotion for me. Thanks and have a nice day :)

[@satsuke]

Up until a few years ago, I used one of these every week or two. It was the headless head for a large HP8420 PA-RISC host. Terminal was around 35 years old and worked a treat when I finally retired it

[@AndyAyres]

Long live the power of the terminal!

[@jean-pierredesoza2340]

You need such an editor emulation as the EDT or later LSE text editor of OpenVMS to enjoy the numerical keypad. Gold 7 => command mode, dot => begin selection ... etc

[@GarryGri]

Brought back memories of me having to book time in the computer room to type my coursework programs, from my hand written listing on actual paper, into a terminal and compile them on the IBM Mini computer (PS. theirs nothing mini about a mini computer, it had it's own glass room ;) I threw out a Wyse 50 terminal sometime in the late Nineties that was gathering dust in the loft. Some people appear to have kept theirs and are now asking the price of a small car on ebay!?

[@MrLurchsThings]

Yeah, it’s gotten a little ridiculous given how simple they are.

[@retrohaxblog]

Pure awesomeness! I remember playing a lot with HP terminals connected to HP-UX back in the day.

[@VK2FVAX]

Dear Mr Lurch. Excellent guide. This made me smile a lot. I do a similar thing with this and a serial annex so I can connect to my HP-UX/AIX/VMS/NetSBD boxes at home via the vt320 and vt510. Great for both work and play. Are you aware that the terminal you have is special? See that yellow key on the numpad? This is referred to as "The VMS Gold Key". If you've not gone on this journey, for bonus points, you may wish to explore the simh emulator and wire that into your terminal. :) Great esoterica video as always!

[@VK2FVAX]

Some other games you can play with VT's is of course NetHack, Rogue and of course Multi-player notepad ..otherwise known as IRC. Great that you mentioned BBS's. On some of the larger terminals it's great to run in 143 column mode with vt220 termcap settings so GNU Screen works really well. I enjoyed this video so much I've watched it twice. Also, I've wondered about the +15v spec of RS232 as a powersource. Enjoy the stats.

[@valshaped]

Serial terminals may be obsolete, but you might be surprised by how often I've connected in to my home server over serial since I set up the thing (all brand-new hardware) earlier this month.

[@boltez6507]

Dude i was searching for such a video for so long,thanks for making this video.

[@RetroSteamTech]

Spent many hours back in the early 1980s playing Colossal Cave on something very much like that. Great video. Cheers, Alan.

[@BM-jy6cb]

Ha ha. I remember it was always a scram to get the VT220 terminals in the computer room at college back in the early 80's. If you weren't quick enough you had to make do with the crummy VT100's. All connected to "super powerful" PDP-11.

[@rud]

I got an old one from the office back in the day and connected to my Amiga because that could reroute the cmd to serial. had no use for doing that but, you know.

[@codingbloke]

The VT220 supported downloadable custom fonts, that is, it could receive a pixel pattern for each character in a font. It could also display multiple fonts on screen at the same time. In the dim and distant past (ok late 80's) I've seen graphical games like QIX running from a VAX/VMS system via a VT220. When the game needed a specific pixel pattern in character cell that it would upload a new pattern for the character in the cell or replace the character with one from a font set that already had the pixel pattern.

[@KaotiqInOz]

This is the second VT220 video (made in Australia) I've seen in a couple of weeks. A few of my first gigs were programming VAXen, so VT2X0 & VT3X0 terminals have a special place in my heart. Did you know there was a version of the VT220 that was manufactured in Australia (I found this out from the other VT220 video I watched recently). Thanks for your work

[@RetroTechChris]

Great video. I love the Raspberry Pi, it serves as a great "plug" for lots of retro workflows!!

[@Crispy3000]

Just to mention my work was looking to see the oldest bit of tech still going which lead me to this video. We have a VT220 in service on our work bench as terminal for enterprise networking switches. Often use for blanking prior to WEEE or to quickly get into a bootrom if needed. VT220 is great due to its almost instant turn on speed. No issues with terminal emulation or handling you sometimes have to fiddle with to get working with Aruba switches.

[@MindFlareRetro]

A great project - super cool. Indeed, it would be nice to see an internal mod with a future version. Also, great hoodie! I still have an Armatron in a box.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Nice! I remember playing with this kind of stuff using a VT100 terminal emulator on an Atari ST hooked up to a Pi a while back, hours of fun 😄

[@saxonian]

Nice video. I wonder if you can get rid of the usb2serial adapter by connecting to pins 8+10 directly? This way you might even see the boot messages in the terminal.

[@771racing]

You need a level converter, which you can get for a couple bucks off Amazon/etc, works great with the onboard UART on the Pi and many other SBCs.

[@hiimcody1]

I've always wanted to try this but haven't had the time or money to invest into it. I'm glad to see someone giving it a go so I can see it working.

[@cpcnw]

Crikey! Have you seen the price of these terminals these days? I really wish I had not been present when one place I worked for chucked loads of them in a skip and paid to have them removed.

[@markarca6360]

You can also use this to configure Cisco devices directly from a serial connection.

[@lelandclayton5462]

I'm currently building a Terminal. Using a 1950's/60's Oscilloscope CRT with enough circuitry to get a basic X-Y Mode along with Matt Sarnoff's Terminal Scope board. Mostly going to use it on my desktop but I might toss in a Pi Zero W.

[@binarysource]

Tip for you, if you run a command and forget to prefix it with sudo you can just do 'sudo !!' (without quotes) - it's been around forever as part of history substitution - useful when on constrained shells without all the modern magic. Love the vid btw, getting a vt220 or 320 has been on my bucket list for a long time but they don't often come up in the UK at a sane price.

[@bobblum5973]

The VT220 (and it's graphic terminal cousins the VT240/241) were at a changeover point in terminals, from super basic dumb terminals to feature-rich ones. They support RS-232, but also the older 20-milliamp current loop interface. They have a BNC video port, and a DE-9 serial port for an attached printer. (That printer port does NOT match the IBM PC 9-pin COM port pinout, so be aware of that if you want to use it.)

[@MrWarneet]

I was an engineer with Digital way before they produces these wonderful things. Back in my day you considered a VT52 leading edge. Bring back the 11/40 and the unibus with the fubar register.. lol Yes it was real, "failing unibus address register"

[@bamdadkhan]

so that's where it comes from.. wow

[@bobblum5973]

I almost worked for Digital but instead ended up at IBM's Services division instead (long story). Still, supported and enjoyed DEC's hardware and software and networking from about 1986 to 2017. Some PDPs, tons of VAXen and Alphas, even an Itanium-based two-node cluster. Terminals from VT05, VT52, VT100, VT220/240/241, and the VT3xx, VT4xx and VT5xx series. I'm not sure why he forced it to VT100 mode, Linux/Unix should understand a VT220, especially since it's a superset of the VT100 capabilities and escape codes. Likewise, why not use 132-column display mode?

[@XalphYT]

I was simply a dumb-terminal user back in the 90s, and the VT-220 was one of my favorites.

[@bobblum5973]

@@XalphYT Even the styling of the case is a timeless classic!

[@highpath4776]

@@bobblum5973 i think college could not afford DEC prices, so a number of terminals to the VAX were Newbury ones.

[@rmccombs66]

If you set the getty for VT220 can you get some functionality instead of using VT100 mode?

[@MrLurchsThings]

I found just a few weird incompatibilities on some BBSs in VT220 mode, hence going back to VT100.

[@an2qzavok]

why vt100 mode? any modern linux system should have vt220 terminfo files.

[@seshpenguin]

Probably defaults to vt100 emulation or something for basic serial. You should be able to set it though (In theory, but support for "real" terminals is not that common nowadays).

[@dossen]

Any interesting capabilities lost by "only" doing vt100? Does vt220 add features that a linux terminal could make use of?

[@an2qzavok]

​@@dossen looking at wikipedia - more character sets. Also, maybe sixel support, I'm not sure.

[@markgarrett8963]

if u want to see graphics it’s vt-240 that you would need

[@oidpolar6302]

Almost. Would be great to see all terminal interaction with the display full screen instead of somewhere far on the background. Thanks

[@MrMorden]

One of my first IT jobs was to network all these up to the hospital mainframe

[@RetroGameCoders]

Ha coincidence - I used this in the NHS, straight out of school :)

[@omfgbunder2008]

Xyplex 😥

[@DouglasFish]

My old hockey program I was doing broadcast for had a generic stats-system that displayed using serial terminals like that.

[@catriona_drummond]

I need something like this to manage my database of broken retro computers parts.

[@jannejohansson3383]

Why you broke your parts :/

[@catriona_drummond]

@@jannejohansson3383 because I am shit

[@orinokonx01]

Gotta pull my HP terminal out of storage!! This video will come in handy 😁 thanks Mr Lurch!!

[@doylemaleche9937]

I have 3 of these laying around. Now there's a use!

[@brandonbrooks2845]

I have an IBM terminal in my collection, doing this soon!!!!!

[@rebootretro]

Nice terminal! At least from the video, looks like its in pretty good condition without severe yellowing. I had a chance to grab a similar unit a year or two back, but passed it up. Figured I have too much hardware already, but kind of regretting that now. I do, however, have an older 1970's DEC VT05 (it's a boat anchor!). It's not in bad shape cosmetically, but I suspect it needs some work under the hood (literally). Planning to make a video of it's restoration at some point, and was thinking it would be cool to connect to a Pi like you did. Anyway, great look at a practical use for a great terminal!

[@kippie80]

I so regret pitching my Qume terminal about a year or two ago from university days. ('90s ... I couldn't afford a 486 in the day and used a terminal to connect to university .. emacs, vi, ah the days, still useful skills today).

[@jacekruzyczka3058]

The keyboard (LK201, I suppose) even features the infamous gold key! I used to use a VT420 (with LK401) as a secondary console on my by-then Linux PC. This was quite common on Unix workstations, which also featured a VGA port for full-graphics monitors.

[@TradieTrev]

You're a great bloke mate, thanks for the in-depth review!

[@TradieTrev]

I'd really love those extra details regarding your wiring!

[@VanceStrickland]

One of the standard go-to terminal based games back in the day was 'nethack' (which had no network connectivity, it was just part of the name). It was an ASCII character-based dungeon crawler where you kill beasties, get gold, etc... Also *some* unix systems actually had a Zork port on them.

[@OzRetrocomp]

It's scary just how much you can do with a dumb terminal (or a micro with a serial port and terminal emulator) when hooked up to a Raspberry Pi.

[@michaelheinrich44]

ist linux and it's unix roots are mainframes with terminals doing 'time sharing'

[@michaelheinrich44]

@@tattoomaniacsalina you could connect a terminal to a MacOS X based mac since it is unix based

[@michaelheinrich44]

@@tattoomaniacsalina 😂 april 1st....

[@theimp67]

This was fascinating and I clicked subscribe. Anyone who puts out content like this is definitely worth subscribing to. It's a little strange to see the technoogy I used in college, and at work (although they were 3270 terminals) being used today. I know Hercules can emulate an IBM mainframe so I wonder if there's a way to hook a VT220 up to that. Even better, a proper 3270 terminal.

[@hallvardpaulsen]

At least some vt220s actually had textronix 4014 emulation, so you could do monochrome graphics! And I think it was also possible to set it to 132 columns of text.

[@grossteilfahrer]

That was the vt240. regis and tektronix graphics. THe tek mode was rather crap when compared to the real thing though - 1024x780 downsampled to 800x240 rectangular pixels. 2 bitplanes so you get off, half and full brightness on each pixel though.

[@hallvardpaulsen]

@@grossteilfahrer You are probably right. I think the vt220 and vt240 looked very similar so you had to menu-dive to tell them apart. The original Tektronix 4014 had a vector storage screen, which was very clear. I was not aware that resolution was actually a thing on these devices. One problem though was that with age the layer that "stored" the image, would start to degenerate making parts of the screen unusable. Anyway.. brings back memories.

[@grossteilfahrer]

@@hallvardpaulsen The vector tubes did not "show" resolution, but there is addresses for the endpoints of the vectors are limited, on the 4010 to 1024x780 (actually 1024x1024, but using more than about 780 will try drawing outside the screen). The 4014 actual got 12 bit adresses so 4096x4096 (with 3xxx viewable). When you compare a 19 inch tube with perfectly straight pencil thin lines to a 800x240 bitmap, the word emulation feels .. inadequate. "attempt at representation", maybe. Also the vt240 (and 241 - in color) has similiar design to the vt220 but a separate base unit and screen. ReGiS is pretty cool though and much faster than the tek emulation.

[@VideosfromNH]

I would love to have a vt terminal connected to my Raspberry Pi. Now I gotta look around online for one, ha.

[@farhanyousaf5616]

Me too.

[@HaroldSchranz]

One of the first terminals I loved after the VT100, the VT220 was cool, and I eventually ended up with a VT320.

[@cpcnw]

I did Level1 COBOL and C on such a terminal. There where 20 of them connected to a single 386SX with 4MB RAM running Xenix OS in a small rented office in a training centre. My final project was a greenhouse control emulator with 6 Rads/Vents and 3 Inputs, Temp/Hum/Draught. It was 600 lines of C using mostly global variables to make things easy. I passed the course. During the sign off, the tutor deliberately entered a temp outside of the design spec range [but spoke a lower number] This threw up my alarm function - which freaked me out as I had tested every single parameter limit. He left me 10 seconds to panic and then started laughing - signed me off with a distinction. Well chuffed I was!

[@MatthewPegg]

You plug it inti an Amiga and it will give you a command shell be default, useful if your amiga monitor is acting up.

[@soundguydon]

I know it's three years too late.. But I really miss those days.. Going to the computer lab and logging in on those exact terminals. Is it ridiculous that I miss using Pine to send emails? ;-)

[@locnar1701]

I used to have a WYSE 60 serial terminal at the end of a 25' serial cable attached to my FreeBSD machine in my dorm room on the other side of the room. The terminal was a the foot of my bed where I could just sit up, grab the keyboard, and then log in and read email and multiplex the screen with GNU screen. I even had a CLI mp3 player that was great to queue up some tunes on the stereo connected to the computer. In other serial news, there is a linux program called ser2net. It will let you publish serial consoles from one machine to a rasberry pi on your network. I have two servers with serial console setup, and I just have to telnet to the pi on a certain port and it connects me to the USB serial devices.

[@flatduckrecords]

Very nice! “Impractical but cool” is my favorite subgenre of retrocomputing! How about simplifying further and drawing power from from pin #9 of the DB25 (12V to 5V using a 7805)? Would that work (reliably) for e.g. a PiZero? Integrate it as part of the HAT?

[@MrLurchsThings]

I looked at the spec for DB25 RS-232 and pin 9 seems to always be unlisted or shown as "testing". On the VT pin 9 is def 12v?

[@MrLurchsThings]

Just put a MM on it - nada

[@flatduckrecords]

@@MrLurchsThings only one way to find out!! 😂 But yeah I read mixed things as well, either “reserved” or “test +12V”. Users on the Arduino Stackexchange have had some success, but point out the max current is not specified (I imagine a Pi4 would draw too much).

[@paulstubbs7678]

That was usually on professional modems, never seen it on a terminal.

[@brianv2871]

Yeah, the problem is that even if you could get voltage off the db25 (or something else coming off the back), there's probably not enough amperage to run the pi reliably.

[@silmarian]

Amusingly, we used things very like this when I worked at Best Buy in the early 90s. So very high-tech! 🙄

[@trevorpomroy550]

I've got a 220 here too. It's white phosphor though. I would have preferred the green! I've used in with linux running in virtualbox before. Just connect the usb device to the vm.

[@garryadamson8507]

This reminds me of the setup they used at my first dev job back in the mid/late 90's. Wyse terminals hooked up to a Linux (Redhat later Caldera) server. Going back even further to college with the IBM 6510 (running AIX 2.2.1) and dumb terminals (not sure if they were serial or not, it was long ago).

[@ConnerBurns]

I've been guiltily looking at my malfunctioning Heathkit H-89, trying to decide if I wanted to give it away (either a hardware issue I don't have the means to diagnose, or a software one I don't have the means to fix, or both). Thanks for the great reminder on the magic of terminals!

[@wisteela]

Excellent video. Subscribed. I'm going to hook one of my old terminals to an original Pi. I always thought you only have to enable the serial port to use the GPIO serial.

[@MrLurchsThings]

I’m pretty sure you’re right there. Although you may have to still play with the baud rate depending on the terminal.

[@randomdebris]

I'm looking for a way for my Raspberry Pi to connect to my classic Apple Macintosh's 8 pin mini-din rs-422 serial interface and join the Apple/LocalTalk network.

[@BritishBeachcomber]

Back in the stone age, I had to code an entire application, in BASIC, just using a two line LED display. Did my head in just trying to picture the other 96 lines of code...

[@mattsword41]

This works really well with french Minitel terminals too - great little all in one machines! Run it off the gpio serial pins with a 3.3v to 5v converter and then a home made serial cable

[@cybersean3000]

You could also use ut with packet radio.

[@widicamdotnet]

One of the less fun parts about doing this (especially with terminal types other than VT100), is you eventually find out how many layers of abstraction and potential breakage there are on a modern linux box between a program and a serial terminal. Kernel buffers, escape sequences, termcap definitions, keycode mappings, different line ending conventions, text-UI toolkits and programs that don't respect termcap and always spew out ANSI escape codes, differences between extended (>127) character codes, possibly unicode conversion, the "readline" library changing (in 2020!) in ways that introduce extraneous escape codes, DTR/DCD signal wires logging you out of your session... wheeeee

[@misterkite]

I did this exact same thing with my vt320. There are some differences though. One, the vt320 uses an MMJ serial port which will require you to make your own adapter cable. Two, my terminal is black and white. I wanted an amber screen but I had to take what I could find. Three, the vt320 supports smooth scrolling, which is beautiful. I have a very short video on my channel demonstrating the smooth scrolling.

[@philsbbs]

Damn brings back memories used to install vt420/vt520 and la75 and microvax and lg31 printers etc for a well known worldwide Retailler.

[@herbertvorderberg]

the problem with serial terminals the absence of unicode support, it would be nice if you could emulate unicode symbols thru sixels

[@DanielMReck]

11:45 "Um, no one seems to be on Twitter at the moment." Little did you know at the time how prophetic these words would be. Let's get this vt220 on Mastodon!

[@fredflickinger643]

Remembering late nights at the VT220 in engineering school:).

[@JimLeonard]

A lot of people these days never think to consider using terminals for what they were 100% intentionally designed for: Working with text. Terminals, especially those with decent keyboards and slow phosphors, are excellent for writing for hours at a time with a minimum of RSI and eyestrain.

[@helios8459]

Hi, where can you find secondhand terminals like this in aus? Did you just contact schools hospitals unis looking for old stock? Thanks

[@SireSquish]

You can pull 5V or 3v3 from the pi's GPIO header if you don't need much power. What would you want the additional USB power for? If you were to sacrifice a 25 pin old-school modem cable you could basically make one end attach onto the pi's GPIO header pretty easily using a female pin header block. And wouldn't you only really need 4 lines - GND, +5V, UART Tx and UART Rx? (I don't have any terminals but this does look like a pretty doable plan).

[@esra_erimez]

My dad used one of these on a VAX 11/780 running BSD

[@BollingHolt]

I cut my teeth on Unix-like operating systems in Summer 1992 as fifth grader in a college computer lab full of these connected up to a VAX! I really want one of these for my collection!

[@yamitanomura]

I remember compiling the software from a terminar :D OMG.. I'm old

[@HoboVibingToMusic]

Be right back, getting a Terminal w/ amber display and hooking it up to my Android box ;)

[@ZombieRyushu]

To do Discord, or anything else, you need the purple-discord module installed and an IRC Client, and bitlbee or Finch.

[@briandenley]

I just acquired a VT-100 type terminal built by ADP. I have three replica computer that use raspberry pi’s (PiDP 8,10,11). How do I get the Pi’s to output serial data to the terminal?

[@bradleylaboe6455]

If you build this you could leach the power for the pi directly from the RS232 of the terminal using some full bridge rectifiers and caps for smoothing due to the spec. 0 (space) Asserted +3 to +15 V 1 (mark) Deasserted −15 to −3 V

[@ButilkaRomm]

Why do you need the null modem cable? Can't you put the the db9 to db25 adapter directly on the the USB to db9 cable?

[@CheshireNoir]

Is the 9600 baud a limit of the VT220 or of the USB adapter? I could have sworn we used to run those at 19.2k or faster connecting back to ancient SUN boxen...

[@MrLurchsThings]

We found that at a higher baud rate, you’d get weird character gibberish. 9600 was the sweet spot for reliability.

[@jeffwormsley7425]

@@MrLurchsThings With no flow control, that's not surprising. Either XON/XOFF or better, RTS/CTS flow control usually fixes those sorts of glitches. Of course, it could also be the USB to 232 converter. Some of them are terrible. Also, you should be able to use VT220 mode instead of basic VT100. This should give you a greater variety of screen control (page up/down, cursor up/down). Finally, one neat thing you can do with DB connectors like DB25 is create the PCB such that pads on the top and bottom edges line up with the solder cups on the DB connector (where the wires solder in). A standard thickness PCB just slides between the rows, allowing you to solder the connector directly onto the board. This can make for a very compact board that fits into the connector shell. While a connector shell wouldn't hold a PiZero, it would easily hold a USB to serial chip and level converter, making a nice all in one USB to DB25 adapter wired the way you need it to be.

[@stevepoling]

You might want to warm up a solder iron and make a serial cable to plug into the back of your VT-220. Don't hook up any more wires than you have to unless you know your UART supports those handshake signals.

[@GrantMeStrength]

I have a VT510 and I like the idea of the neat little dongle. Mind you, there’s probably space inside the monitor to hide a pi zero.

[@wisteela]

I've got one of those terminals too!

[@elektron2kim666]

I use Putty in Zorin OS to type MMBasic into some Pico's and my micro controller ideas started to work. They become "small computers" for something.

[@wisteela]

I'm doing this with a Wyse WY-60 and a Raspberry Pi 1.

[@elyuw]

In my first job in the early 90s I got a brand new Wyse60 to replace some other old terminal, i felt like a King! I have zero use for one but would love to own one.

[@wisteela]

@@elyuw Great that they emulate such old terminals. Great replacements.

[@domramsey]

I really like the idea of using a Pi Zero W to add serial connectivity to old devices. Could you not just wire a 25-pin serial connector straight to the appropriate GPIO headers on the Pi? I really want to be able to do server management from my Tandy Model 100 and look like an awful hipster.

[@colonelbarker]

This video was recommended at the Amiga meet in Canberra last night.

[@Richardpasquinucci]

I want one of those. I remember using them in college

[@SparkyMAWy]

It'd be nice to see all text from boot piped out to the terminal, rather than to the console device if it is run headerless.

[@MrLurchsThings]

I believe that’s possible if you pull the serial directly from the GPIO ports.

[@TroyFletcherKeyboards]

Awesome project! Also, 'sudo !!' will run the last run command with sudo.

[@PaulinesPastimes]

Pointless but fun. Some of the best things are pointless but fun :-) Fascinating video and good to see a terminal expanding it's work role and being saved from the scrap heap. I once worked for an insurance company that had WANG 4230 terminals, which I have recently found out have a Z80 CPU. I was entranced by their design and always wanted one. I wonder if anyone has done something similar with one of these. 👍😊

[@Storm_.]

Why is the null modem cable required? Please explain, I'm trying to configure my pi to a wyse 120 but not having much luck. Using the same usb connector as you but without the null modem cable, it came with a single db9-db25 converter connector which plugs in to the back of the wyse.

[@widicamdotnet]

Serial connections have "one way" data wires - one for sending and one for receiving, as seen from the "terminal" end (DTE). The null modem cable (or adapter, they also exist as zero-length adapters) crosses those wires over so that what one side sends, ends up on the receiving wire on the other side. Without this, if both ends are "terminals" in the DTE sense (which both the terminal and the Pi are), both sides will be shouting into the same pipe and neither side will hear the other. Modems had their sockets wired up differently - "DCE" style - so they used straight-through cables. The genders of the plugs *usually* respect this, so that "if it fits, it's wired correctly", but you do sometimes find adapters that change the gender without crossing over the wires, and allow you to make non-working connections.

[@Doug_in_NC]

Was there a special reason for configuring the terminal as a VT100 rather than VT220? In VT220 mode you get a larger character set and a faster maximum communication speed. You should be able to configure it for a 132 column screen, full 256 character ASCII and 19,200 baud. My distant memories of using a VT100 tell me that even in VT100 mode, 132 columns should be possible.

[@jonpinkley2844]

132 column mode (at least full 24 lines) on a VT100 required the Advanced Video Option (but all ours were purchased with that option installed). The advanced video option also allowed for reverse video, and other character attributes and some additional characters sets. The VT102 included the advanced video, but I don't think it was possible to add the 20ma loop interface (it was not upgradeable). But I almost always used 132 column mode, especially after the VMS terminal driver supported command recall (but editing was limited to a single line). The VT100 was a huge improvement over the VT52 that it replaced, especially when editing over a 300 bps modem connection, because the VT100 allow for escape sequences to insert a character in a line, or to insert a line and shift the screen (without having to resend the whole screen contents again). Of course the editor had to support the feature set, which EDT did.

[@Doug_in_NC]

@@jonpinkley2844 Yes, that makes sense, the one I used had reverse video too.

[@MrLurchsThings]

The pair *really* didnt like anything over 9600. No idea why, but cranking it higher resulted in weird characters or no comms at all. VT100 was mainly around some compatibility with a few BBS's I was playing with.

[@michaelsworkshop9031]

Why not just mount the rPi inside the terminal, and just connect wires direct to the solder joints where the existing 25 pin serial connector is (plus 5v for the pi) ? This skips the need for all these adapters and custom pcbs (apart from converting the TTL serial from the pi). With Linux installed on a rPi zero W, you won’t need physical access much once the initial install is done, and the terminal could then be standalone. Great video!

[@frogbertrocks]

Why not install the pi inside the terminal?

[@tarawood-bradley2119]

I started my career on those terminals and even today they are still in use today, either hardware or software based

[@MrLurchsThings]

Yup. You still see a lot of old systems still be connected to via a terminal emulator.

[@tarawood-bradley2119]

@@MrLurchsThings Even modern systems are text based, windows servers have the ability to remove the GUI as it is an overhead on systems performance.