Purely because LGR Just put a video out. Anyone here have memories of using these things? Better yet does anyone have any right now? I like that Clint was able to use a device to get wifi going on it, but I have to wonder what other uses they could be put towards, If nothing else using as set dressing for an indie film or youtube project would be interesting.
However I’m wondering, in today’s technological climate that is smartphone centric? What practical use would a terminal have? Granted I could totally see me using one of these as a dedicated ‘this is me word-processing’ by having it telnet into another computer on the local network and run nano, or some other linux terminal program. Though that now has me wondering how this would do if using tmux.
Oh man it sucks having an expensive set of interests and basically no money or space. I have a lot of ideas but no real way to see how viable they are.
Lots of us still have serial terminals - I have a Wyse, but wanted a DEC one for a long time. However what I mostly use is a Raspberry Pi with 4 x USB Serial dongles for my little retro collection.
Many years back I did use real serial terminals though but not for very long. I started “proper” computing on an Apple II, then moved to TTY 33’s (ugh) at uni, then serial terminals with stuff like CP/M and the uni PDP11/40 Unix system. a few years later it was Sun workstations though…
Today? I still use minicom which is a serial terminal program that runs under Linux - there are many variants for all platforms. ASCII art isn’t dead yet … And there is even a PacMan game that runs on a serial terminal, however the retro scene is where they’re at …
My college had a lot of these VT320s for accessing the VAX computers on campus (along with VT110s). They’re great little devices and I would love to find one in the wild (Though I have an ADM-11 that I’m most happy with).
Funnily enough I also used Omniterm to get on to the VAX / Sun SPARC machines in college as well. But that font was really, really fuzzy on my unmodified Atari 800XL.
I’ve got something like this, from work when they were throwing them all out. I think it’s just a VT220 though… checks… no, it is indeed a VT320, but looks like it might be a green-screen one. It’s got a sticky label: BRMC MASTER FEP
which is a hint. I’ve not powered it on for years, perhaps since getting it. But it’s there when I need it!
Be still my beating heart. I have many nostalgic memories of green screen monochrome. Pair that with the smoothness in text scrolling shown. Yes. I have no real ability to use and no place to put one, but I would definitely like one.
I have a VT320, but the last time I powered it on something went “bang” in the power supply and I haven’t tried to fix it yet.
I also have a VT510, in unknown but presumably “it worked the last time” condition.
Oh wow - the VT510 has a built in calculator function with octal and hex conversion - immediately useful and a totally justifiable purchase, at £175 and up.
Actually, on the original PiDP-8, you had to break off two resistors and rewire a few jumpers on the Pi-board for a single, true serial connection. However, there are better ways about this now (pty and /dev/ttyUSB0). You may in fact conncet more than a single console via pty, provided you’re running a multiuser OS on the emulated PDP-8. So, I guess, time sharing with TSS/8 should be posible.