Got this cool looking, old terminal.

[Gorgonops]

It looks like it's a macro key for sending a predefined ASCII sequence at the touch of a button. Apparently some paper teletypes had them as well, programmed by physically breaking tabs off a drum. (It looks like on early LSI terminals you could get your custom message burned on a PROM, later ones had nonvolatile memory.) In practice you'd use it to store a station identifier, or possibly an initialization/login sequence to send to the host as needed.

 

[ScutBoy]

Huh, I had seen that 1983 manual but failed to notice it also mentioned the "+". Scanning the manual it seems like it's pretty much a 3A with the fuller keyboard and, well, that's pretty much it.

Sort of wish I could lay my hands on one of these to use with my NorthStar CP/M box, assuming I ever get around to getting that working.

Gorgonops,

If you are looking for a serial terminal, I may have a Televideo 925 to part with. Looks very much like a classic VT-100. I also some DEC VT-220s but I'd have to make sure I have a keyboard to send along.

 

[falen5]

thanks gorgonops

 

[Kaa]

Wow does that bring back some memories sitting a very cold room coding COBOL and RP/G in High school. Aside from getting an old VAX to put in your basement, with a manual and the Modem port on the back, I would think that some tinkering could get that old terminal hooked up to the serial GPIO pins of a Pi as stated above. might be a good way to start learning some Linux!

 

[MacNoob]

I have an old Vax (Vaxstation 4000) sitting right here behind me - using my windows PC with a serial port as a terminal.

That ADM would work fine with it.

 

[Nathan]

Wow does that bring back some memories sitting a very cold room coding COBOL and RP/G in High school. Aside from getting an old VAX to put in your basement, with a manual and the Modem port on the back, I would think that some tinkering could get that old terminal hooked up to the serial GPIO pins of a Pi as stated above. might be a good way to start learning some Linux!

I mean somebody got a literal 1930s teletype working on a Linux box with some custom hardware adapters,  so surely a dumb terminal would be just fine. Of course you probably do need to configure the Linux end properly.

https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/teletype-model-19

https://adcurtin.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/adm3a-ancient-dumb-terminal/

 

[hwertz]

I mean somebody got a literal 1930s teletype working on a Linux box with some custom hardware adapters, so surely a dumb terminal would be just fine. Of course you probably do need to configure the Linux end properly.

https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/teletype-model-19

https://adcurtin.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/adm3a-ancient-dumb-terminal/

Believe it or not I did just this. I started using Linux in 1993; when I went to the university in 1997-2001, they were STILL using them. They retired them in like 1999 I think. For some reason I remembered them being ADDS Viewpoints, but they looked like a ADM-3A and had no arrow keys like an ADM-3A. They had these hooked up to a terminal server so one could connect to university systems via telnet and read e-mail and such. I had my home computer connected to the internet via dialup and could connect into that. Linux has full termcap and terminfo -- instead of TERM=xterm or TERM=linux, I'd log in and then run "export TERM=adm3a". Simple as that; I haven't seen a modern Linux yet (including ones crammed onto access points and sh..stuff.. where you'd really think they'd strip it for size) that doesn't have a full terminfo database.

I do recall the terminal was TOO dumb for some programs, so I'd run "screen" (which also supports multiple text consoles with "Control-A then a letter" style commands to create, cycle through, etc. virtual consoles.) This terminal ONLY supports clearing the screen, moving the cursor, and moving text up a row, i.e. scrolling down (by putting the cursor in the bottom right position and printing one more letter of text). Programs that used ncurses didn't give a care, programs that pulled data from termcap/terminfo and handled drawing out a full screen app themselves generally couldn't deal with it, they'd just complain needed features were missing.

So, I'd run "screen", screen sets "TERM=screen" but "TERM=vt100" works if your system didn't have screen terminfo for some reason, this was a quite featureful text terminal so anything ran on it fine. Note, it supports scrolling one way, so if I fired up a text file in "joe" or scroll through one with "less", scrolling down through text was fast, it only had to send the next line of text; scrolling UP involved rewriting the ENTIRE screen of text.

I also picked up a second-hand VT102 and had that in the basement, my bedroom was upstairs but my typing would keep my parents up so I ran like a 100 foot serial cable down to the basement and logged in with screen from it. The cable was probably too long, I kept burning out serial ports (on the computer, the VT102 was a beast). Or maybe those superIO chips were "12V tolerant" 5 volt chips, and they truthfully weren't THAT 12V tolerant? I don't know. I'd burn out a few ports a year, when I got down to 1 working port I'd buy another el-cheapo "floppy/IDE/2 serial port" combo card for like $12 or so.