On Mar 30, 2014, at 21:39 , Derrick Meury <rmx44 at aim.com> wrote: There are exceptions, but most dumb terminals I've encountered have an RS-232-compatible serial port and use the ASCII character set. They can often be used with other makes of computers. Things like graphics characters, cursor movement, full-screen editing, etc. may or may not work in any given combination, depending on whether the computer knows how to control that particular terminal. A lot of terminals were made for generic use with lots of different computers, and those ones will often be configurable to emulate one or more common kinds of terminal. Also, a lot of computers were made to be used with multiple manufacturer's terminals, so they can speak multiple languages. Besides hooking an old terminal to an old computer, it can also come in handy as a user interface and/or debugging output for hardware that has a serial port for control and/or debugging output. For example, you could hook one up to a home-made project based on something like an Arduino board. So even today, a dusty old terminal can have some practical use beyond its collector interest. -- Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net> http://www.nf6x.net/

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

Back in the mid 1970's the console terminal was nearly always a printing treminal of some type. At DEC we gradually migrated from ASR33's (teletype) to dox matrix types such as the LA36 and the LA120. ? You could roll back the output by flipping back through the pile of paper. Noisy, dot matrix character I/O a line at a time. Wonderful !!! Real computing !!! ? Paper Tape - Yes please !!! 80 Col cards - Right on brother !!! Mag tape drives in six foot racks - Ooh! Ooh! ? If you can hear yourself think somethings not running. ? Rod Smallwood ? ________________________________ From: drlegendre . <drlegendre at gmail.com> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Monday, 31 March 2014, 7:28 Subject: Re: old terminal computers. 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:

On 03/31/2014 12:06 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote: Yes, I know where there's an IBM terminal at a thrift store in the local town, but it's twinax rather than RS232, and as far as I'm aware that was exclusive to IBM hardware - the terminal itself probably isn't particularly capable, but it's tied to something which supports twinax (I assume it came cheers Jules