Best dumb terminal for serial connections

[Jason Evans]

Hi all,

I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.

The only thing that I ask is that it has a serial port that doesn't require a
lot of modifications to get going, isn't too rare and therefore expensive, and
I am partial to amber screens instead of green screens.

Like I said, I'm not looking to buy anything yet but if you have any
suggestions on what to keep an eye out for, please let me know.

Jason

[Scott Lurndal]

Lear-Siegler ADM-3A.

[Peter Flass]

My experience is old, but most dumb terminals were pretty good toward the
end of their run. I liked the VT-220, but the IBM 3101 an HP terminals.
were OK. There should be lots of those around.

--
Pete

[Peter Flass]

That too.

--
Pete

[Jason Evans]

Scott Lurndal wrote:

> Lear-Siegler ADM-3A.

I saw one of those on YouTube and they looked really neat and almost exactly
what I would like to have. I'll just need to find one that isn't rediculously
expensive.

[Jason Evans]

Jason Evans wrote:

If it doesn't put out too much RF interference, a Heathkit terminal might be
nice. Put it next to a HW-101 for logging.

https://i.redd.it/hjoj2wxtcfh21.png

[Dan Espen]

xterm! rxvt! putty!

Can't imagine actually wanting a tube CRT in my house.

--
Dan Espen

[Scott Lurndal]

While emulators are nice (I wrote one for the Unisys T27),
I really enjoy using the real thing sometimes (I have two).

[Dan Espen]

For very small values of enjoy I suppose.

I'm using a 27 inch flat panel with 5K resolution.

Now, that's a "real thing" I can get behind.

--
Dan Espen

[Scott Lurndal]

I've a pair of 27" 1920x1200 color calibrated
flat panels in front on an articulated stand
and a 4k 32" to the right.

But when I'm running the burroughs emulator, using the real
T27 lends verisimilitude to the emulation.

[J. Clarke]

I believe I've got a couple of new in box ASCII terminals of some sort
or other in the attic. Many decades ago Tech Data sent them to me by
mistake and didn't want them back and I never had a use for them. If
you're interested I'll see if I can dig them out and get the details.
If you're not in North America though the shipping may be more than
they're worth. That assumes of course that the squirrels haven't been
at them.

[Joe Pfeiffer]

New serial terminals are, as far as I know, extinct. My favorite
terminals back in the stone age were the DEC VT-220 and the Zenith Z19
(also available as a kit from Heathkit as the H19). I actually have a
Z19 in my collection (no, I'm not selling it).

On those rare occasions I've needed a serial terminal in the last couple
of decades, I've used minicom on a Linux laptop.

I have no experience with the Pi, but I do with other similar boards.
Every single one has had a perfectly acceptable ssh server I've been
able to access over my home network easily right out of the box.
Several (all? Don't know enough to claim this but it wouldn't surprise
me) Pis have HDMI outputs and can talk to USB keyboards, also out of the
box. So I'm not quite sure why you want to talk to one over a serial
port.

[Dan Espen]

It's clearly a quest for low resolution.

I haven't ordered my first PI yet but I've been studying.
Some have bluetooth and wifi. Lots of ways to ssh
into one of them or connect a keyboard.

I assume this whole thing is for the nostalgia value. Whatever that is.

A few years back I converted over 500 vinyl albums to flac files.
So, I have 500 albums with all that artwork on the covers.
The records themselves were not in good condition.
I trashed them. Can you imagine how much nostalgia got wrecked?

Not a problem, I can press one key and listen to any record I ever had.
Right now, Dion and the Belmonts, Where or when.

If I was so inclined I could convince my music player to show me the
album cover. In 5K.


--
Dan Espen

[Charlie Gibbs]

"24x80 ought to be enough for anyone."

I still have a couple of H19s myself...

> I haven't ordered my first PI yet but I've been studying.
> Some have bluetooth and wifi. Lots of ways to ssh
> into one of them or connect a keyboard.
>
> I assume this whole thing is for the nostalgia value. Whatever that is.
>
> A few years back I converted over 500 vinyl albums to flac files.
> So, I have 500 albums with all that artwork on the covers.
> The records themselves were not in good condition.
> I trashed them. Can you imagine how much nostalgia got wrecked?
>
> Not a problem, I can press one key and listen to any record I ever had.
> Right now, Dion and the Belmonts, Where or when.
>
> If I was so inclined I could convince my music player to show me the
> album cover. In 5K.

That reminds me, I have to find a scanner that does 12x12,
for the really obscure albums - or the ones with lots of inserts
(e.g. Guess Who's _Artificial Paradise_).

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

[J. Clarke]

On Tue, 17 May 2022 18:43:22 -0400, Dan Espen <dan1...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Pis are fun. I have one that I normally access through RDP. But it
displays fine on a 4K TV. And one time just for the heck of it I got
Z/OS running on it. Was ungodly slow, not even good enough to play
with, but it booted and ran and I could log into it.

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Jason Evans <jse...@mailfence.com> said:
>I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
>dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
>like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.

Note that the Pi serial port is not going to work directly on a classic
terminal. The Pi signalling is not RS-232 (typically +12/-12V IIRC) but
3.3V/0V. Sending more than 3.3V into a Pi serial pin will fry it.

There are pre-made Pi-to-USB serial adapters for connecting to a PC, but
I don't know if there are pre-made Pi-to-read-RS-232 adapters.

--
Chris Adams <cma...@cmadams.net>

[Dan Espen]

Charlie Gibbs <cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:

> That reminds me, I have to find a scanner that does 12x12, for the
> really obscure albums - or the ones with lots of inserts (e.g. Guess
> Who's _Artificial Paradise_).

For a while, during my vinyl conversion, I'd also cut a CD with the
album content. Of course I had to create a CD label too. One of the
easiest images to obtain is the album cover.

--
Dan Espen

[Dan Espen]

J. Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> writes:

> Pis are fun. I have one that I normally access through RDP. But it
> displays fine on a 4K TV. And one time just for the heck of it I got
> Z/OS running on it. Was ungodly slow, not even good enough to play
> with, but it booted and ran and I could log into it.

I suspect z/VSE would have been a lot better.

--
Dan Espen

[Charlie Gibbs]

Agreed, and I snaffle them myself from various places. What isn't so
easy to find are all the extras that are sometimes included, such as
in _Artificial Paradise_. The original album came packaged like one
of those Publishers' Clearing House offers, with so much stuff that
I didn't play the album that often for the simple reason that it took
so long to get at it. I challenge you to find all that stuff on the
'net. (That's why I want a 12x12 scanner.)

[maus]

On 2022-05-17, J Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 May 2022 12:57:02 +0200, Jason Evans
><jse...@mailfence.com> wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>

> or other in the attic. Many decades ago Tech Data sent them to me by
> mistake and didn't want them back and I never had a use for them. If
> you're interested I'll see if I can dig them out and get the details.
> If you're not in North America though the shipping may be more than
> they're worth. That assumes of course that the squirrels haven't been
> at them.

I have a sudden vision of Squirrels tapping away at dumb terminals, and
wondering why they were getting no reply. Thanks for that.

NO CARRIER


--
grey...@mail.com
Human Life will not end with a `Bang', but with a `D'oh'
Romantic Ireland is done and gone, it's with O'Leary in the grave.

[Jason Evans]

On Tue, 17 May 2022 10:47:20 -0400, Dan Espen wrote:


> Can't imagine actually wanting a tube CRT in my house.

One of the current hot nerd topics is the idea of putting together retro-
futuristic cyberdeck devices as secondary or project devices. Cyberdecks
are machines with tiny lcd screens with nearly full sized keyboards.

I got the idea that I would like to so something similar in the same
vein. Much of my day to day work life is in the the terminal so I thought
how about using an old machine (dumb terminal) to do real day to day
work. A raspberry pi zero-w could easily be placed into an dumb terminal
and connected directly by serial and still have access to bluetooth and
wifi. I would just need to wire up the serial connection and 5v for power
for the pi. Any work that requires more computational power than the pi
can provide is just an ssh command away.

Is it a stupid idea? Probably. However, it would be a cool piece for a
man cave and it could possibly keep one more piece of equipment out of
the landfill.

BTW, my main work setup is also 2x 27" monitors. Those are nice for my
graphical needs, so I'm not completely against anything modern.

Jason

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Joe Pfeiffer <pfei...@cs.nmsu.edu> said:
>New serial terminals are, as far as I know, extinct. My favorite
>terminals back in the stone age were the DEC VT-220 and the Zenith Z19
>(also available as a kit from Heathkit as the H19). I actually have a
>Z19 in my collection (no, I'm not selling it).

I have a C. Itoh 101 (rebadged on the front by Intergraph) in great
condition collecting dust. I really have no use for it, or the Sun and
Alpha servers its sitting on. I don't know if I could find somebody
local interested in any of this, but I can't imagine paying to ship it.
Sooner or later, it'll all go to the recycler.

--
Chris Adams <cma...@cmadams.net>

[Magnus Olsson]

Well, it's a matter of personal preferences, of course, but I can think of two reasons (apart from the one the OP wrote about downthread, that of making new hardware that's deliberately retro, a bit like those "steampunk" interfaces that look like they were made in 1890):

1. The joy of keeping a "living museum piece" up and running, similar to the joy of having a vintage car in your garage and taking it out for a spin every now and then, even if you don't use it for your everyday travel.

2. Nostalgia value, if you first cut your teeth on that kind of equipment.

Personally, I can see the appeal in all these reasons but CRTs have a rather large footprint and I don't really have the desk space for one.

[Scott Lurndal]

Andreas Kohlbach <a...@spamfence.net> writes:

>On Wed, 18 May 2022 00:09:54 -0000 (UTC), Chris Adams wrote:
>>
>> Note that the Pi serial port is not going to work directly on a classic
>> terminal. The Pi signalling is not RS-232 (typically +12/-12V IIRC) but
>> 3.3V/0V. Sending more than 3.3V into a Pi serial pin will fry it.
>>
>> There are pre-made Pi-to-USB serial adapters for connecting to a PC, but
>> I don't know if there are pre-made Pi-to-read-RS-232 adapters.
>

>Curious, somebody threw out a 2011 LED TV. One jack on the backside is
>labeled RS-232. What would you do with that on a TV?

1 - Access for repair, diagnostics and service updates.
2 - Access for high-end AV control systems (Yamaha has
RS-232 ports on their receivers for that purpose).

[Quadibloc]

On Wednesday, May 18, 2022 at 7:49:35 AM UTC-6, Magnus Olsson wrote:

> Personally, I can see the appeal in all these reasons but CRTs have a rather large footprint and I don't really have the desk space for one.

What with the implosion hazard, high voltages, and X-rays, if one has small children or pets, I
can certainly see someone deciding to resist the pull of nostalgia.

Plus, with the passage of time, such items are now expensive antiques instead of cheap
junk.

John Savard

[Dan Espen]

Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> writes:

> On Wednesday, May 18, 2022 at 7:49:35 AM UTC-6, Magnus Olsson wrote:
>
>> Personally, I can see the appeal in all these reasons but CRTs have a rather large footprint and I don't really have the desk space for one.
>
> What with the implosion hazard,

When I was a kid, the property I lived on was frequently a dump site.
There were lots of TVs dumped there. We'd heard that word, "implosion",
sounds a lot like "explosion" doesn't it?

Well, we broke lots of TV tubes, rocks, steel shafts, anything we could
find. Never got any satisfaction out of it. The tubes just break.

--
Dan Espen

[Joe Pfeiffer]

When the computer center on campus was disposing of a bunch of CRT
terminals some friends of mine and I went out to the local shooting
range and used them for target practice. Same (lack of exciting)
results you saw. A paint can full of water is a lot more fun.

[Charlie Gibbs]

On 2022-05-18, maus <ma...@dmaus.org> wrote:

> On 2022-05-17, J Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 17 May 2022 12:57:02 +0200, Jason Evans
>> <jse...@mailfence.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>
>> or other in the attic. Many decades ago Tech Data sent them to me by
>> mistake and didn't want them back and I never had a use for them. If
>> you're interested I'll see if I can dig them out and get the details.
>> If you're not in North America though the shipping may be more than
>> they're worth. That assumes of course that the squirrels haven't been
>> at them.
>
> I have a sudden vision of Squirrels tapping away at dumb terminals, and
> wondering why they were getting no reply. Thanks for that.
>
> NO CARRIER

You need a small dog to go after the squirrels - hopefully ones that
won't chew on the cables themselves.

No! Sparky! Get away from that power co

NO TERRIER

[Dan Espen]

We tried to break the screen with target arrows. A few good shots could
crack it. This was in the Bronx. Firing a gun would draw too much attention.

So, it's the "implosion myth".

--
Dan Espen

[Peter Flass]

Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 18, 2022 at 7:49:35 AM UTC-6, Magnus Olsson wrote:
>
>> Personally, I can see the appeal in all these reasons but CRTs have a
>> rather large footprint and I don't really have the desk space for one.
>
> What with the implosion hazard, high voltages, and X-rays, if one has
> small children or pets, I
> can certainly see someone deciding to resist the pull of nostalgia.

IME you really have to work at it to get one to implode. The desk space
issue is probably a bigger problem.

>
> Plus, with the passage of time, such items are now expensive antiques instead of cheap
> junk.
>
> John Savard
>

--
Pete

[Dennis Boone]

> When the computer center on campus was disposing of a bunch of CRT
> terminals some friends of mine and I went out to the local shooting
> range and used them for target practice. Same (lack of exciting)
> results you saw. A paint can full of water is a lot more fun.

You need old Toughbooks to shoot. A rifle round has enough power to get
the magnesium to flare as it goes through. (A 9mm handgun doesn't have
enough power to _get_ through.)

De

[Johnny Billquist]

I use a VT525 with an LCD screen. Real terminal, nice screen. Can't beat
that. :-)

Johnny

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2022-05-17 12:57, Jason Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
> dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
> like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.
>
> The only thing that I ask is that it has a serial port that doesn't require a
> lot of modifications to get going, isn't too rare and therefore expensive, and
> I am partial to amber screens instead of green screens.
>
> Like I said, I'm not looking to buy anything yet but if you have any
> suggestions on what to keep an eye out for, please let me know.

A little unclear what "best" means. But anyway, there are plenty of
semi-modern used terminals available.
Looking at ebay for VT terminals turns up plenty. But the prices vary a
lot, with the majority looking to be about the $500 range, but there are
some that are cheaper.

I'm sure if you search around, you find more places. And I've not tried
looking for any other terminal models either. I like the DEC VT
series... :-)

Johnny

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Jason Evans <jse...@mailfence.com> said:

>I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
>dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
>like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.

One additional thought: using a traditional hardware terminal for
something modern like a Pi could be problematic - newer stuff like that
pretty much assumes full ANSI plus Unicode. ANSI is (more or less) a
superset of VT102/VT220, so most escape sequences will work on a classic
terminal, but Unicode definitely won't.

--
Chris Adams <cma...@cmadams.net>

[songbird]

Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
...
> A father of a friend owned a shop selling TV and radio equipment. In the
> garden behind the shop were dead TV. We smashed some screens with a
> hammer. I can confirm they did not implode.

i was sitting right next to an old B&W TV when the screen
broke. no idea why, i hadn't even touched it. it didn't
implode or explode - more like a cracking noise and then it
sorta crumbled. considering i haven't thought of this in
some 40-50yrs i'm surprised at how much of it i remember.


songbird

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, songbird <song...@anthive.com> said:
> i was sitting right next to an old B&W TV when the screen
>broke. no idea why, i hadn't even touched it. it didn't
>implode or explode - more like a cracking noise and then it
>sorta crumbled. considering i haven't thought of this in
>some 40-50yrs i'm surprised at how much of it i remember.

When I was like 3 years old, my sister was sitting across the room while
I was eating cereal. She did something that annoyed me, so I chucked my
cereal bowl at her (given where she said I was sitting and how far and
accurate my throw went, my parents should have signed me up for Little
League ASAP).

She ducked, and instead of hitting her, the bowl hit the big old console
TV she was sitting in front of. The bowl broke of course, but it did
crack the screen, just off center. For some years after, it looked like
there was a fly on the screen, or news announcers had something stuck in
their teeth.

No implosion though.

--
Chris Adams <cma...@cmadams.net>

[chris]

On 05/17/22 11:57, Jason Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
>

> I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
> dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
> like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.
>

> The only thing that I ask is that it has a serial port that doesn't require a
> lot of modifications to get going, isn't too rare and therefore expensive, and
> I am partial to amber screens instead of green screens.
>
> Like I said, I'm not looking to buy anything yet but if you have any
> suggestions on what to keep an eye out for, please let me know.
>

> Jason

If you must have a real terminal, then a dec vt100 vt220 or up
would guarantee it would work with any vt100 compatable system.

Use minicom under FreeBSD or Linux here most of the time. Not
perfect, but gets the job done...

Chris

[chris]

Lucky man :-)...

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

ISTM that a Raspberry Pi, good keyboard, LCD monitor and
USB<->RS232 dongle could make a very nice terminal - just a SMOP.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

[Lawrence Statton (NK1G)]

Easibus peasibus ... set your locale to iso-8859-1 ... That is
almost-exactly the Digital Extended Character set. If there's glitches
it's going to be in something like the ij character.

[Vir Campestris]

On 18/05/2022 14:49, Magnus Olsson wrote:
> 2. Nostalgia value, if you first cut your teeth on that kind of equipment.

This.

I have an ICL branded Kokusai terminal on the shelf behind me, and I
need to get around to repairing the PSU on the computer it belongs to.

When I do I know it will power up with the time and date set to the time
and date of my eldest son's birth as the RTC battery is long dead.

My son is pushing 40...

Andy

[Peter Flass]

It would be a fun project to read a datastream including Unicode characters
and convert the character data to a bitmap to be written to the screen.

--
Pete

[chris]

On 05/19/22 20:19, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 19 May 2022 19:55:40 +0100
> chris<chris-...@tridac.net> wrote:
>
>> On 05/19/22 10:56, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
>>> I use a VT525 with an LCD screen. Real terminal, nice screen. Can't beat
>>> that. :-)
>>>
>>> Johnny
>>
>> Lucky man :-)...
>
> ISTM that a Raspberry Pi, good keyboard, LCD monitor and
> USB<->RS232 dongle could make a very nice terminal - just a SMOP.
>

Right, and there is a packaged pi with inbuilt keyboard available
now. Not too expensive either and could be tempted. Rpi comes of
age, sort of...

Chris

[Lawrence Statton (NK1G)]

It's not at all hard, just tedious. First you convert the UTF-8 stream
(since virtually all Unicode text streams use it) into a sequence of
unicode code-points. The trickiest part is dealing with composite
forms. And just the volume - there are currently about 145,000 defined
code-points, and folks are adding more every edition.

[Rick C]

On Tuesday, May 17, 2022 at 6:57:16 AM UTC-4, Jason Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
>

> I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
> dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
> like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.
>

> The only thing that I ask is that it has a serial port that doesn't require a
> lot of modifications to get going, isn't too rare and therefore expensive, and
> I am partial to amber screens instead of green screens.
>
> Like I said, I'm not looking to buy anything yet but if you have any
> suggestions on what to keep an eye out for, please let me know.

If I needed a serial terminal to manage an rPi, I think I would use another rPi. Isn't that a good solution?

There is a reason why terminals don't exist much anymore.

[Daiyu Hurst]

On Tuesday, May 17, 2022 at 6:57:16 AM UTC-4, Jason Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm going to be moving soon and after I get settled in, I would like to find an
> dumb terminal that I can use with a serial connection to a raspberry pi. I'd
> like any suggestions you might have for such a machine.

My favorite remains the Wyse 50 with an amber phosphor tube. The green phosphor models can be
found, but not the amber. I curse myself for leaving mine behind.

But you have to disable the "Function" key in the lower left of the keyboard (X-Acto). If not,
you will curse every time you press it by mistake.

-Dai

[Ahem A Rivet's Shot]

On Sun, 29 May 2022 10:29:16 -0700 (PDT)
Daiyu Hurst <daiyu...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My favorite remains the Wyse 50 with an amber phosphor tube. The green
> phosphor models can be found, but not the amber. I curse myself for
> leaving mine behind.

Have you ever tried to reproduce that amber on a colour monitor ?
I've never been able to get it right, I'm not convinced it's possible.

[Dennis Boone]

> But you have to disable the "Function" key in the lower left of the
> keyboard (X-Acto). If not, you will curse every time you press it by
> mistake.

We used to put a paper clip through the stem of one of the keys on the
tvi925 for similar reasons. I think it may have been the Print key.
We figured that was a reversible hack.

De

[Kurt Weiske]

To: Ahem A Rivet's Shot
-=> Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote to alt.folklore.computers <=-

> My favorite remains the Wyse 50 with an amber phosphor tube. The green
> phosphor models can be found, but not the amber. I curse myself for
> leaving mine behind.

AAS> Have you ever tried to reproduce that amber on a colour
AAS> monitor ? I've never been able to get it right, I'm not convinced it's
AAS> possible.


Oh, thanks all for the memories. My first job was on a Microdata 9000 Pick
system, with Televideo and Wyse 50/60 terminals.

When it came to the Phosphor Wars of the '80s, I was in both camps.
Green/Hercules graphics on PCs, Amber on terminals.

kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org
| http://realitycheckbbs.org
| 1:218/700@fidonet


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