A terminal with a one-line display, for just $400
One of several photos found here
(I’ve been meaning to post this and say more about the context but in the intervening weeks I seem to have lost the context.)
THE MIGET The Miniature Interface General-purpose Economy Terminal is all that name implies. It provides direct access to minicomputers through a standard RS-232C connector, standard ASCII code and features a bright 32 character display. $400
I wonder how many programs were prepared to work on a single-line terminal, and on what systems. Certainly Unix (with its habit of CR/LF/prompt after every output) isn’t going to be fun. A lot of word processors from a somewhat later time have a similar interface, with a keyboard and a one-line display; perhaps they learned from an existing tradition?
Oh, good point about LF… I wonder if the shift-Z there is a scroll up? (It’s marked as an up-arrow.) And likewise possibly shift-X which is an underscored left arrow.
A quick search showed a post
in a Facebook group by Santo Nucifora who seems to be the owner. And who might even be here… @snuci is that you?
Yes, that’s me.
It’s a terminal I acquired just recently. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with any documentation so I’ve basically played with it and figured some of it out through trial and error. I connected it to a PC via null modem cable for testing (via TeraTerm). I configured it to add linefeeds to incoming carriage returns.
The Miget has four dip switches on the bottom but I haven’t explored those any further. It came with a cable that I’ve been told is a V.35 cable and that might have been used to connect to older routers. Perhaps for console access? I don’t know for certain.
Interesting vacuum-formed case, but the LED displays make for interesting character choices. Looks like 7 segment but with an additional vertical segment centred in the top?
Just as a kind of funny aside: I was asking me that, too, what could you do with just a single line, readouts from data acquisition and/or lab equipment, maybe? Then I remembered that my first computer was a tiny BASIC machine with a single-line 24-char display and that this was totally fine and navigable.
Yes, not the sunburst display (the ones with diagonal segments) you may expect. I do like the characters, though.
At uni. I did some work on an Aim-65 which had a 14-segment, 1-line display It was very usable.
And almost forgetting - the first computer I ever used - HP9830A also had a single line display of slightly better dot matrix characters…
And like the Sharp PC-1211 and the (PC-1500) quite usable with the ability to quickly scroll up & down.
So I think a terminal link this will probably need some local buffer memory to store a few lines of a page of text, or possibly support from the system it might have been designed to connect to?
-Gordon
An interesting adventure! The one large DIP visible in your photos is a UART, the AY-5-1013A, so I think the second DIP, on the hidden side of the keyboard PCB, must be the brains of the operation. Presumably a single chip microcontroller with just a little internal RAM and enough ROM.
For the record, I tried to take it apart further to see what that chip was when I originally took these pictures and that keyboard board is not budging so I had to leave it alone for fear of breaking it.
Ah - perfectly justifiable, of course!
One other apparent defect is that isn’t remotely close to 72 columns of characters. I’m not sure how usable it would be with various different old timesharing systems’ command lines, but as soon as you started working with text you’d find yourself in quite a bit of pain.
It’s a recurring thought I have to build a text terminal out of 9 or 14 segment displays. (Or hey, let’s dream - nixie tubes.) Maybe 64x16 to fit a Forth screen and keep cost down.
