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Comment by senko | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago (around '96), a bunch of us used to spend way too much time at the public terminals in university computing centre (SRCE) in Zagreb, Croatia. They had about 10 compatible terminals (VT-220's and IBM-3151's) - and two Sun Sparc workstations that were set up as graphical terminals using CDE.

We had to wait for an hour or two to have one of the text terminals free up (damn MUD players hogged them up all the time, and we IRCers just wanted to chat online!). Getting access to the graphical terminals was nigh impossible unless you were there from the early morning or if you stayed through the night (the place was open 24/7 if you can believe it).

Ah the wonders of graphical Unix! Multiple workplaces! I fondly remember the doplhin wallpaper - my fave. And you could use Mosaic to browse the web (Netscape was running pretty sluggish)! Nevermind one of the workstation had a b/w monitor, it was still an amazing experience.

Fond memories.

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They were VT320s with beautiful amber color! A few years prior to that I hang out there as well. I remember a bunch of (older) students were taking precious time on one of the Suns (Jagor) and all I wanted to do was to run rendering algorithms I wrote in C on it (I was a highschool kid). So, I devised a devious scheme. I wrote a C program that malloced memory like there's no tomorrow. I figured out that SunOS didn't have a memory quota for users. What happened then was that I got a PID for my program and waited patiently until the whole OS crawled to a halt (usually fast enough it started trashing the hard drives due to lack of memory). Students, out of frustration, would leave the terminals one by one as their IRC sessions and whatnots would stop working. It was a rule to never leave your terminal without logging out, so I had a clean system. Once they all left for a break, I killed my PID, got back the memory and resumed my snowflake rend.. er, work. Fun times!

denial-of-service attack

Are there any hardware options connecting old monochrome screens (such as MDA or Hercules) via modern technologies like USB?

Yes, there's a multitude of USB-to-RS/232 adapters and Linux can easily be configured to echo a terminal to the serial port from boot onwards. Once you've got a serial console you can do whatever you want.

Depending on the terminal, you'll need to fiddle with baud rates, parity, and obviously hardware issues such as male/female connectors and number of pins. It took me quite a while to get my VT100-compatible terminal talking to my RaspberryPi3, but now it does, and it's great fun (particularly since I set up SIMH and have an ancient period-appropriate version of Unix V emulated).

Brings me back to when Greybeards reigned the Earth (or rather the machine room).

Thanks! I am looking to attach just an older monochrome monitor to a current-day PC rather than a full-blown terminal. I was unable to find any obvious solutions with a quick search.

I believe the constraints of the older technology may offer some advantages like reducing eye strain, nostalgia (as you mentioned), and maybe even making the interface obtuse enough to reduce my interest in staying online. Your suggestion sounds doable today and would accomplish my intended goal.

I fully support using older (simpler) interfaces to avoid distraction but I am afraid I have to inform you that green phosphor screens are quite a strain on the eyesight.

Similar experience with Aix and DG/UX terminals.

Those pesky fellow students using a 21'' monitor to be able to run 4 simultaneous xterms running a mix of MUD and talk sessions, whereas we wanted to make use of the X graphics capabilities. :)

Where those terminals open to the general public, i.e. people with no affiliation to the university?

The centre provided various networking-related services for all the universities in croatia, and by extension the high school network as well (these are somewhat linked in Croatia).

So anyone having any connection to any university or highschool in croatia could get an account on a public server (there was just one opened to the general public and had a dozen thousand users or so) and access the termiinals.

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