Digital VT100 (1978)
oldcomputr.com
oldcomputr.com
Starting in the late 1980s, I spent a lot of quality time with DEC VT220 terminals. Solid buggers.
Later on, I used a lot of different VT100 compatibles, plus genuine VT100s/VT10xs and (on occasion) ADM-3As. All connected to PDP11's of one sort or another.
Personally, the nicest one I ever used was a Pericom [0], about the only model that I'd rate above the actual VT100. It had a few annoyances related to imperfect VT100 emulation, but it has the sharpest screen ever (there was some sort of a fine black mesh over the tube that enhanced the display).
[0] http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?34615-Pericom-7800...
[0] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-1-S...
While old computers are effectively useless except as curiosities, an old video terminal is still just as good at its job as when new.
The fact it worked at all is pretty impressive. There was even a termcap entry for the ancient and crusty terminal.
Smooth scroll is actually quite easy in hardware, as it's just a case of changing the scan line offset by 1 each frame. A small handful of TTL chips will do it, later a small tweak to the CRT controller, and nowadays about a bazillion CPU cycles to do it in software.
Most obnoxious, from the standpoint of a terminal emulator developer: origin mode.
To be frank, it'd require some departures from the original - speeding up to consume large off-screen buffers and slowing down to a human pace when the buffers clear - and, like any extra feature, it'd be a burden to be carried for the foreseeable future, so I completely understand them saying a polite, but emphatic, no.
https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/4j03d056k
The first multi-user multi-tasking computer that would fit on a _desk_.
1MHz, 16K of 32bit memory.
Weighed over 50lbs.
It was designed to be compatible with the VT-100 since there was a mode where the system used special escape codes from the remote terminal to substitute for instrument function keys on the local console keyboard. Manually or by script once smart terminals came out.
To save memory each user could run multiple instances of the same basic program plus more than one basic program at a time.
His one chromatograph is mainly not pictured, it is to the left of the data system and weighed about 80lbs.
It has to be said, plastics technology has improved a bit. Those things weren't UV stabilized at all.
I wonder how much effort it would take to connect it to a Raspberry Pi.
Should be quite easy. You'll need a USB-serial adapter for the Pi, and a cable with a 9-pin serial adapter on one end and a 25-pin on the other.
Now, the way my luck works, it usually turns out that my random assortment of serial cables means I end up with the USB converter, a null modem adapter, the serial cable, and a 25-pin gender-bender just to get all the wires in the right order and fitting into the ports properly :)