Building an IBM 3270 terminal controller
ajk.me
ajk.me
I still have my own VT520 <3 Not getting rid of it (my girlfriend keeps asking why do I keep that old thing around, grrr)
I used that every day as my daily driver terminal for 10-12 years - I got it was what was effectively NOS, so zero hours on the tube. I've not turned it on I think in 8 or 10 years.
I'll drag it out once I clean up the garage this summer.
App support is pretty horrible these days though. Most apps don't bother reading termcap/terminfo anymore and just blast Xterm whatever to the terminal :) That makes the functionality a bit limited.
I did some of my best work on those terminals though. Especially because they didn't have a browser. Very distraction-free. I can see why this works out so wel for people like George R.R. Martin.
So tmux doesn't do this well either? Too bad. I'm not surprised screen does it well though, with its long history.
By the way one thing that's a bit sad about the VT520 is that it looks really boring. It has a standard "VGA Monitor from the 90s" look. The great thing is that it takes standard PS/2 keyboards unlike the previous special ones. But the VT220 and VT320 looked much cooler.
Not to mention the VT05 by the way, that was straight out of star trek <3 It was deep as hell though, no way that would fit on a modern desk. It didn't even have a CPU, it was full of boards of discrete logic.
The gui apps connected to it are just sending the data stream in the background.
Long lasting technology really.. But we're on the way to replace the core now.. Not looking forward to it tbh!
For me, an interest in retro tech is seeing how people did things in the past and realizing we lost some "nice" experiences along the way.
Also, in a world where everything becomes obsolete at record speeds, something so obsolete feels stuck in time.
This is true. In summer when I sit in the dark with the windows open (hot country and no AC and I don't want to attract bugs), my 4K computer monitor is totally incapable of dimming to a level that doesn't blind me. Even with white on black/dark mode and brightness set to 0. In fact, even during the day I work with brightness 0 on that thing, it seems all monitors are optimised for max brightness these days.
Meanwhile, my old VT520 terminal has an analog brightness dial which I can turn so low that I can barely make out the letters in a pitch-black room <3
The purest “retro” experience I’ve had wasn’t retro at all: Stepping into an MIT Athena lab a quarter century ago to see an SGI Indy ready for my login.
In a way, it’s like finding out what winning the lottery would have meant for a curious tech nerd.
But HP and IBM made boring old boxes :P I did love HP-UX though.
However even in these days they are expensive, plus I don't have the space or power requirements for one of those :) There's are reason they were called "big iron".
For example, there are modern games made by hobbyists for old systems that completely outclass literally anything that was available contemporaneously. Today anyone with a computer has access to development hardware, software, documentation, and community resources that are all just lightyears beyond what was available then at any price. Changing a few lines of code and instantly hopping into a cycle-accurate emulator to test takes milliseconds versus writing out floppies or EEPROMs. Arcane tricks that only a privileged few knew (if that) are now common knowledge. That stuff leads to whole other strata of capabilities being accessible.
From across the cube farm there was an "oh no" Turns out that our co-worker didn't attach to the dev system, he attached to the production environment. As users detached sessions and reconnected, they connected to his desktop. As his desktop got more and more sessions, they got slower and slower.
Lucky for him it was only our building, the main phone center wasn't involved.
Still think of you buddy, one of my favorite "back in the day" stories.