A good real terminal

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 09:43:20PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: When I worked with DEC equipment every day (1984-1994), we had a few terminals die. The bulk of our stash was VT100-family terminals and CiTOH clones, with a few VT220s. We never moved to anything newer since they did everything we needed, and by the time the VT320s were available for less than retail, we were on such hard times, that there was no way to justify the cost of a newer terminal. My recollection is that we had very few video problems with VT1xx terminals. I think the only common problem we ran into was dead keyboards or dead keyboard circuits in the terminals themselves. We had enough spares lying around that we never investigated the faults. We just swapped out the hardware and put the broken stuff on the bench for the hardware guys (who never got around to poking inside). The two faults I remember with VT220 terminals were dead 9636/9737 EIA chips, and loss of horizontal hold. It was tough getting the old EIA chips out to mount sockets (must have had heavy copper inner layers on the mainboard PCB), but once that was done, those were easy to fix. We only lost about one a year, anyway. The video, I was never able to fix myself with what I knew then. Perhaps I could fix it now. I don't think we ever had a total loss of video on any model of terminal, mostly just the faults I described. Hardly scientific, but it was a sample size of several dozen terminals, in operation for at least 10 years. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 16-Apr-2008 at 21:20 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -69.7 F (-56.5 C) Windchill -111.2 F (-79.6 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 15.2 kts Grid 72 Barometer 679.1 mb (10662 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html