The TTY demystified (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The TTY demystified (2008)

linusakesson.net

161 pointsiveney17 comments

Linus Akesson is quite a character, and you can certainly spend some time on his website. Be sure to check out his chip music http://www.linusakesson.net/music/chipmusic.php and especially the piano music paired with chip tunes; http://www.linusakesson.net/music/piano.php

You're quite a character yourself!

...When do we get more cooking videos?

Hmm, I should send him pictures of the guts of my ASR-33 a "real" teletype, aka tty. :-)

And for the record it is much safer to pronounce it 't-t-y' rather than 'titty' as one professor at school was fond of doing. I was in the unfortunate situation of being in a meeting to analyze image data where he said "Ok, everyone grab a titty and lets get to work." Sigh.

According to Gordon Bell, one of Digital Equipment's top engineers, originally the consoles that computer companies first built used typewriters from the typewriter companies. Unfortunately the typewriters were found to be unreliable as they were not designed for continual typing. So they took a "cheap" teletype from Teletype corporation (which had made Teletype machines that ran 24/7/365) the model 33 and used that. Even though it was the 'cheap, lightweight' version of a Teletype it was 100x more reliable than the typewriters it replaced. Only IBM stuck with their Selectric typewriters as consoles (but they were the manufacturer of the Selectric so they could beef them up accordingly, and they could change the font with a type ball).

Blocked by Fortiguard, and reported.

Edit: To clarify. It was blocked. I reported this 'false positive' to Fortiguard to remove it from their list. They normally clear it in 24 hours.

I had a look at the page source and didn't find anything remotely "dangerous" there. There's just a bit javascript to (de)obfuscate the author's email address, the rest is pretty standard stuff.

When I read this comment, I immediately asked myself: "What's wrong with the site?"

Now, I'm asking myself: "What's wrong with tools like Fortiguard?"

The category was: Proxy avoidance.

Yes, Fortiguard is a POS, but some of us have no choice behind corporate firewalls/proxies.

"Blocked by Fortiguard, and reported."

Why would it be blocked by anyone?

Who knows? Why does people downvote me for reporting the issue ?

Without your clarification, it seemed you were saying that this page was malicous, just because that strange tool said so.

It is dangerous! It's a Productivity Sink

i downvoted you earlier because your comment sounded like you felt protected from some threat by some fortiguard thing and also reported the alleged malware. simple misunderstanding from non-verbosity.

"We have already seen that a TTY device may be configured to give certain data bytes a special treatment. In the default configuration, for instance, a received ^C byte won't be handed off to the application through read(2), but will instead cause a SIGINT to be delivered to the foreground job. In a similar way, it is possible to configure the TTY to react on a stop flow byte and a start flow byte. These are typically ^S (ASCII code 19) and ^Q (ASCII code 17) respectively. Old hardware terminals transmit these bytes automatically, and expect the operating system to regulate its flow of data accordingly. This is called flow control, and it's the reason why your xterm sometimes appears to lock up when you accidentally press ^S."

A 12-year-old mystery to me is finally solved.

Remember when emacs used these as shortcuts?

I'm old enough to have hung out with others breaking into mainframes to play Star Wars inspired text games on printed-paper TTYs. (I was in grade school at the time.)

I'm younger than that even, but I think its invigorating there is a generation trying to re-discover the innovations from that era. I wish HN had more links like this, and not just Facebook/Groupon/Bitcoin market-o-rama.

One thing missing... all the bugs and misinterpretations in all the various unixes around this stuff :-)

OOhhhh ! `kill -l` !!!

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