On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 02:20:35PM +0300, Mihai Popescu wrote: > Hello, > > This question is somehow off topic but I know there are some readers > here old enough to shade some light in this matter. > I want to get and idea of what was or is an old true hardware UNIX > terminal. I have searched google, but the word "terminal" associated > with UNIX points most of the time to what we know today as UNIX shell. > If someone, please, can show me a doc or explain a little bit what was > a terminal at that moment back in time. I know that it was some kind > of hardware, maybe RS232 related, used to connect to some main frame. > But I am unable to find the details. I even lack some tech words to > search deeper on the web. > > Thank you. >
I owned, until a few years ago, an orange-on-black vt320 terminal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT320). I used it to interface with my Sun Ultra 5 workstation and I also used it for an older Sun SPARCstation 4. I believe I ran OpenBSD on them, but I'm sure I used NetBSD most of the time (late 90's). I've always been working at the command line. so I'm not really interested in the X stuff, especially not on slower hardware. Working on the vt320 was easy on the eyes (soft large-ish letters) and the monitor itself was smaller than the bulky CRTs of the pre-LCD era. I used it at home from time to time, not at work. I gave it, and the Sun machines, up when I got tired of the long compile times of the machines and the slow serial line to the terminal. But I still regret dumping the terminal, it was kinda neat. I might be trying to find another one eventually, or something like it, but I have nothing to connect it to at the moment... -- Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri, Bioinformatics Developer, Uppsala, Sweden OpenPGP: url=https://db.tt/2zaB1E7y; id=46082BDF ------------------------------------------------------------------------
