20 Jul
2011
20 Jul
'11
8:42 a.m.
On 20 Jul 2011 at 10:46, Rod Smallwood wrote:
They had limited functions and were really glass
teletypes.
Not so the VT100. A really well engineered micro processor based
terminal with more functionality than a programmer knew what to do
with.
For their time, the VT52 terminals were quite a bit more than glass
TTYs. I've used terminals that really were glass TTYs; at most, you
could erase a screen or (hopefully) a line. There were terminals
that did not implement any sort of scrolling.
The VT-52 is pretty much full-featured with cursor positioning, erase
to end of screen/line, primitive graphics, XON/XOFF flow control and
a cursor keypad.
For its time, not bad and certainly useful--and certainly enough for
most editors and applications. One could have wished for a way to
display characters wtih attributes (reverse, bold, underlined, etc.),
but that's a minor quibble. Software-controllable scroll-lock would
have been nice...
But there were far less-capable terminals at the time. The VT52 was
one of the terminals that moved the interactive mindset away from the
teletype meme.
--Chuck