30 Mar
2014
30 Mar
'14
11:28 p.m.
Oh - and to answer another shade of your question..
Yes, some terminals (we would call those "proprietary" terminals) are only
designed to communicate with a particular make / model of mainframe or
mini-computer that's running a particular set of software. I +think+ that
some or all of the PLATO terms fall into that category - flame me if I'm
wrong.
But the majority of terminals fall into the generic "dumb serial terminal"
category, and (with a bit of setup) can be made to communicate with
virtually any machine which is willing to talk to a terminal via a standard
RS-232 serial port. There is some setup required on both ends - the server
box needs to know what type of term it's talking to, and the term needs to
be configured to properly handle the serial line to the server. But in
general, it "just works".
If you want real fun, find yourself a functional ITT paper-printing
teletype (say "tele-tank") machine, and get that hooked up to your Linux
box - and from the Linux box, to the web. That's right, read email and
Twitter on paper, heh..
On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 1:11 AM, drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Derrick - do you run any form of BSD, or Linux
(like Ubuntu, Mint,
Fedora, etc) or anything along those lines?
Pop open a terminal window on your Linux system and work away. Basically
+anything+ you can do in that terminal virtual terminal window (like
navigate the file system, run many programs, including text-based email and
web browsers), you can do on a +real+ physical terminal, like a VT102 etc,
that's connected to your Linux machine via a cable.
FYI, I regularly use a Tandy Model 100/102 as a dumb terminal connected to
a Linux box - in this case, it's a Slackware box, but that doesn't matter.
All of the BSD/Linux OSes handle external terminals in a very similar way.
So if you want to play with terminals, I'd suggest setting up a Linux
machine if you don't already have one.
Does that help? ;-)
On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:12 AM, R SMALLWOOD <
rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com> wrote:
There's difference between a computer
terminal and a terminal computer in
my mind.
A computer terminal can be regarded as an I/O device. Keybord in and
screen/printer
out.
A terminal computer usually has local processing and can run stand alone.
For example there were variants of of the DEC VT100 with a LSI 11
cardcage and integral tape drives.
So take your pick, computer terminals are usually dum I/O devices and
depending on what emulations they support can be conneced to one or more
processors.
Terminal computers have an on board CPU
Rod Smallwood
________________________________
From: Derrick Meury <rmx44 at aim.com>
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Sent: Monday, 31 March 2014, 5:39
Subject: old terminal computers.
i have wondered something. do old terminal machines need to be used with
their own server box or can they be used with other machines. also what are
some stuff u can do with an old terminal