4 Nov
2007
4 Nov
'07
1:09 p.m.
On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 03:26:58PM -0500, Ray Arachelian wrote:
M H Stein wrote:
>-----------------
>A moot distinction; what's the difference? If you must have a terminal box
>instead of just running your vintage hardware from the computer on your
>desk, just take an old laptop, remove the (perhaps broken) display, stick
>a USB or Flash disk in it to boot and run emulation S/W from, plug in your
>keyboard, display and RS-232 cable and how's that different in any real
>sense from a fancy terminal? CPU, EEPROM, RAM and I/O; sounds the
>same to me, and probably free...
One of the reasons I still maintain dumb terminals is that I don't have
to worry about OS issues, about boot times, bugs in terminal emulators
(or lack of emulation of historic terminal bugs), features that I occasionally
use like VT100 double-high-double-wide or an EDT keypad.
I am periperally (no pun intended) interested in a generic hobby-level,
*documented* small terminal core. I don't really care about the processor
or FPGAs or whatever. Cost is an issue. Unless it's really cheap, I'll
just keep using real terminals or full-on PCs for terminal access for the
forseeable future - and by cheap, I mean well under $200. I've bought
usable laptops (600MHz, 512MB, Ethernet, USB, Firewire...) for less than
half of that this year.
That's exactly what I do. I've got a couple
of old mini notebooks that
I use as terminals. They're
worthless for anything else as they're ancient and would only run
something like win95, so I set'em
up to boot up in Hyperterm.
I am already doing that, but with even older hardware - an 8-bit Zenith
laptop with dual 720K floppies, booting DOS 3.3 and running Kermit. At
least it's better emulation than Hyperterm (which IMO is terrible), and
since I have a Xircom PE-3 and DOS packet drivers, I can also slap this
terminal on a network and telnet around (not that most modern networks
*want* you to telnet around anymore). The only thing I want to do with
Win95 is play ancient games, and Win98 does a better job of that for me
(but that's another topic).
If you must, you can boot Linux from a disk-on-chip.
See: http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8844506693.html
This is certainly one way to go, and probably easier than hacking
BIOS ROMs. I have seen DoC, but haven't done much with it. All of
my embedded Linux hacking has been with CF adapters and 2-16MB flash
cards.
But a VT100 is still ready faster.
-ethan
P.S. - we still have a few dumb terminals around at Pole, and we still
use them to talk to some of our embedded gear.
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 4-Nov-2007 at 20:50 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -40.2 F (-40.1 C) Windchill -66.6 F (-54.8 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 9.3 kts Grid 52 Barometer 687.4 mb (10350 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html