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Comment by dingosity | Hacker News Reader

I feel old. I remember when we moved from telnet and rlogin to ssh and this was in the man page. I'm also happy to learn kids are still using terminals and ssh.

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I suspect many linux users nowadays don't even know that manpages exist or don't want to use them. Otherwise blogposts like this would not exist.

They know the man pages exist and they want to use them, but most are written to merely be consistent in format and not necessarily in content. The worst thing to omit is examples.

What users do nowadays is rely on alternatives such as https://tldr.inbrowser.app/

This is my experience with manpages, they're great if you sort of know what you need or want deep CLI options reference but often lack in recipes or examples.

man -k

Man pages are too long and technical for 70% of casual use when the answers are a Google away. Normal usage patterns don't involve using every option, and that's what man pages are focused on documenting.

I'm not sure why a video of a 60's TV show would be useful when you're trying to get an explanation of command line options for common posix commands. But you do you.

I’ve been around Unixes since the early 90s and was around for the transition away from telnet and I only learned about this about 5 years ago. Shoulda read the whole man page, I guess.

Well... terminal emulators. Bonus points to everyone who has an actual VT240 on their physical desktop.

> Bonus points to everyone who has an actual VT240 on their physical desktop.

Bonus points to anyone who can find one and get it to work. I want one, but it's a huge investment (both in price and effort)

Yikes. Yeah. Went on ebay thinking they couldn't possibly be THAT expensive. I was wrong. I wonder if there's a market for a $200 VT420 clone built with a FPGA that has a USB connection for a keyboard and a HDMI connector for a monitor?

The MAME emulator will actually run a VT260 rom, allowing the emulated serial port to be output to a socket.

Are guides available on how to setup and use?

Edit: Found this https://zork.net/~st/jottings/Real-VT102-emulation-with-MAME...

Here are a bunch of URLs that I collected for the VT240.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/terminal-simulator/issues/1

https://www.mail-archive.com/simh@trailing-edge.com/msg09086...

https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Num...

https://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/qgzCvrl8/dec-vt-emula...

The command that I ended up using was:

  mame -rp . vt240 -window -nothrottle -host null_modem -bitb socket.foo.com:23

MAME is just crazy. I only learned recently it contains the best Sega Genesis emulator and now you tell me it does terminal emulation, too.

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