Using an Atari ST as Unix/Linux Terminal
atari-wiki.com
atari-wiki.com
One war story, a big name company had some image processing that needed to be done on a spacecraft. Their scientist had written some software in lisp which was incredibly slow and took 15-30 hours to process one image on a Sun workstation. I was brought in to port it to C in the hopes of improving it, as well as to add several new features. I saw that his algorithms were really bad and rewrote the entire thing using entirely different algorithms I invented myself, bringing the run time down under 10 seconds on my Atari.
I was pretty excited about this. The scientist took my algorithms and published them in a journal as his own work without crediting me. So I quit. Still pissed off about that one.
Two years later I get a call from that division, saying they “may” put my name in their patent if I disclose more details about the technology.
I’m still pissed about that.
Plagiarism like that is far too common. Every paper a plagiarist gets away with helps their career and hurts other more honest folks because the number of academic positions is limited.
* This (exact) one: http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37926/Moore-Reed-TC-3...
Most books would print a program for BBC-Basic, and give you a set of lines to change for other systems. e.g. Adding in the LET statement for Spectrums.
The worst part is that we didnt have the 1541 drive yet, so the game was only around for as long as the power was on.
The good old days lol
Type-righter itself was included on the covermounted tape once that became a thing.
The instructions for getting a TTY login session on the terminal device are now out of date. /etc/inittab is a thing of the past, and telinit q is no longer the tool.
In systemd operating systems, one would instantiate a serial-getty@ttyUSB0.service , tweaked to set the TERM environment variable appropriately.
On systems with nosh service management, one creates and uses an agetty@ttyUSB0 or mgetty@ttyUSB0 service bundle, adjusted with "rcctl set" to set the TERM environment variable appropriately. (What one does on runit/s6 systems is, of course, similar.)
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/inittab-getty-is-history.html
* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/inittab-is-history.html
* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/248313/5132
* http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/guide/real-terminal-login.ht...
One benefit that the linked article doesn't mention is the ability to initiate file transfers over the very same serial connection using ZMODEM / YMODEM / Kermit etc. When I had this set up it was very useful to act as a bridge to my NAS and download software from there onto the ST.
Good times!
Of course, no-one in their right mind would do this to run a second terminal, as the Atari ST had the worst keyboard since the ZX81.
I hooked up an Oric-48k as a terminal once, having owned an Atari ST, I'm kinda in agreement with you. The Atari Keyboard had a weird springy feel about it, had Atari made mattresses, they would probably of been the best in the World - based upon the spring-feel of their keyboard.
Though the Psion II I used with the serial adapter was the most funkiest at the time, ABC style calculator keyboard (still better than ST apart from layout). But it was portable and a dream. Though I still to this day and occasionally use my Psion 5mx with serial adapter cable.
I never ran unix on it, but I wrote a VT100 emulator for it to connect to a multi-processor Xenix machine.
Almost certainly the latter. Linux ran only from the 386 upwards.
The ST's keyboard was crap, but the Mega ST (not Mega STe and TT tho) had a good one. Mechanical (cherry) keyswitches.
In its favour, there were some good terminal emulators for the ST, and its mono monitor was good quality.
I also used the same ST to retrieve usenet and email via UUCP somewhere around 1990 or 1991.
Good times.
At one point working from home basically meant I was SSHing into work via an 80s micro / personal computer. Albeit my Raspberry Pi did all the heavy lifting.
Re the ST's keyboard: I didn't think it was so bad. I could type easy enough on it and I've used plenty worse.
http://www.retro-commodore.eu/network-installation-on-the-am...
Can it `ssh brow.sh`?
This is just connecting up a serial console, nothing more.
Classic ST can't do it, because no MMU. On them we had MiNT, which was a Unix-like extension to TOS. Ran fine on an ST with a 1MB or so of RAM. At various times I ran a full suite of Unix ports... bash, emacs, nn, vi, the whole nine yards. There was also a port of the MGR window system.
But the machines with an '030 (TT And Falcon) could run a proper Unix. Including X11. I remember even seeing discussion of this in UnixWorld magazine back in the day.
Yes. I do this occasionally with a TRS-80 Model 100.
And back when they were both still current, I would dial in to a PR1ME and Vax minicomputers with a Commodore 64.
My holy grail is figuring out how to run a personal Zork server on an Ubuntu machine that I can access (serial or telnet) from the 100.
What on earth is a "Zork Server" anyway?
A regular A500 can do TCP/IP just fine without a vampire.
By using AmiTCP or roadshow TCP/IP stack and PPP, SLIP, PLIP (e.g. with a plipbox) or a NIC based on the left expansion header.
A600 and A1200 can simply use a PCMCIA card. The typical choice is ne2000-compatible cards using the cnet.device driver.
I also use cnet.device in my A1200.
As an aside, the ne2000 cards do also work on the Amiga ports of Netbsd and Linux.
You can even get TCP/IP stack and a Web browser running (though things are very slow and many sites do not work).
And its 70Hz mono monitor is still decent by modern standards. (If you've only seen 70Hz colour CRTs: the ST's mono monitor is not the same! Mono phosphors look quite different. No flicker, like an LCD, but with restful, paper-like contrast levels, like a Kindle.)