Question about possibility of host pi sending messages to the ITS teletype Model 33

[Capnrob97]

Hello,

I have a PiPD10 that runs on a shelf in my office with a small monitor attached to it via the host pi, and I have the teletype model 33 active.

As a test, I logged into the model 33teletype as lars, and from a vt52 terminal was able to :SEND a message to lars and it printed out on the teletype.

My thought is, if it is possible, is having the host pi periodically grab news headlines, weather, etc off rss feeds and send it somehow to the model 33 teletype within ITS, simulating an old school news room getting news feeds on its teletypes.

Is there anyway to pull this off, or am I just wasting my time? Trying to get the pipd10 a little more useful when it is just idling while I am working.

Thanks for any feedback.

[Albert Corda]

HI!

    I have no experience in ITS, but back in my youth I did quite a bit of programming on a TOPS-10 system.   in TOPS-10, you could open a "PTY" device (a pseudo-teletype) and send monitor commands to it as if you would be typing them yourself.    One common trick back then was to send a continuous loop of SEND commands to a selected terminal via a simple assembler program that opened a PTY and channeled the commands to it.   The result was that the unfortunate receiving terminal became unusable, do to the incessant barrage of received messages.   Nasty, but harmless (what college kids did back then... instead of drugs and video games, it was Jolt Cola, Pizza, and late-night hacking sessions on a free timesharing terminal).

You could possibly use the same approach to do what you asked, if ITS has a similar PTY device available (and I'll make a bit it does, since most of the PDP-10 batch processing applications I"m aware of. as well as OPSER,  needed that facility)  Just build a send command with the text you want appended to the command, open a PTY, and send the text buffer to it. In TOPS-10, you didn't need to open it for both input and output (unless you were interested in the response from the command you were sending), but again, ITS may be significantly different....I have no experience with it.

Hope that helps!

ajcorda

Old Tops-10 hacker ;-)