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!
