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.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

My old Gerber "SignMaker" had a unitized KBD/MoBo like that. All the keyswitch signals went thru some I/O chip or other on the board. It might be as simple as pulling or desoldering such a chip and replacing it with a board to wedge the keyboard at that source and feed it right into the Pi world, leaving the rest of the machine bone stock? You could toggle between dumb terminal and Pi input.