old terminals...

Ya know... this recent talk of terminals got me thinking..... It would be a good idea IMHO to preserve the functionality of all these classic old terminals. After all, sooner or later the real ones will disappear or at least stop working. After all, some systems are picky about only working with certain terminals (or some only work WELL with certain terminals)... Then I started thinking... most modernish "good" terminal emulation packages don't support all the old venerable classics. Sure, many do VT100 (sort of). But when was the last time you saw a terminal emulation package that faithfully reproduced a beehive minibee? Or a Heath H19? I think it might be helpful for the future if there was a "collectors" terminal emulation program that really did strive to get emulations for all the old terminals, and get it dead right. I know it'd be nice to have one emulator for my systems that "did the right thing(tm)" on my HP mini's, my DECs, DGs, and my Heathkits, GA Zebras, TI990's, etc. etc. all with one program. Instead I have to have many different terminal emulation programs (because one that does HP2624 emulation wont do my TI terminal emulation...)... or the real thing (which of course I'd prefer). So then my unix-centric brain said... Oh, well, there's always termcap/terminfo. Surely that will document old terminals for posterity and future emulation. So I just popped in to my local copy of terminfo and sure enough, there's even an entry for the beehive minibee and superbee. BUT... I then noted the comments that say "hey, this termcap entry is pretty wrong and doesn't work right". So relying on terminfo for preservation is probably not a great idea. But it's a start. Just thinking out loud... would be nice to have a terminal emulation program that was easily extensible for any terminal, already had all the ones defined that we here are familiar with... and ran on everything from MS/DOS to Vista to *nix. A classiccmp'ers terminal emulator :) Maybe a good start would be those of us that have particular terminals at least going in and correcting the terminfo entries that are incorrect. Perhaps this is a silly idea and I just need my morning coffee! Jay West