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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

I have a real vt100 in my basement, not sure if it works.

It would not be difficult to attach and run mgetty on the serial port.

If you do wish to play around with it, given the age, I would suggest having someone familiar with older power supplies and CRT displays to test the PSU and CRT high voltage circuits.

It's possible something of that vintage will have a capacitor fail shorted, and applying power could fry what would have otherwise been a relatively easy fix. They're basically museum pieces at this point, and somewhat valuable (both $ and historically) if it is working regardless of cosmetic condition.

I used to buy old DEC terminals on Ebay in the early 2000s (there seemed to be a lot of stock from US Post Offices, you could tell from the burn in on the screens) and hook them up to a x86 FreeBSD desktop. I think the 320 was my favourite - they had great keyboards. That was my cheap multi-monitor solution back then - just run terminals with separate keyboards! Of course this was when we had cubicles with enough space for that kind of thing... I was doing sysadmin work back then on big Sun servers which were located in another state anyway but I used to get a kick out of showing people walking past that I was running harrypotter.com from a screen session on a VT320.

Anyway one day I came back from lunch and everyone was standing outside the building with the fire department. A capacitor on one of my beloved terminals had blown and the smoke set off the fire alarm. After that my boss quietly asked if I could leave the vintage hardware at home. Although soon after we discovered a stack of old SGI Indy workstations left over from the VFX on some movie...

My arm boards have no GPU but do have a USB to serial adapter built in...

Setting it up was as easy as editing inittab to disable the stock ttys and enabling ttyS0. (Systemd is a little more complex, but afaik it's the same except its unit files instead)

Some things i had to consider with my vt520:

- Not all baud rates work reliably, the higher ones cause screen corruption probably due to clock drift

- Flow control is required because the terminal is likely not fast enough to keep up with all output. Software flow control (XON/XOFF) can't be used with tmux because tmux is hard-coded to disable it

- No support for unicode characters

Out of curiosity, how fast can you go? I think the default for my board is 115200, haven't tried going higher.

115200 is out of reach for 80ies hardware. I ended up picking 9600 as standard for my retro stuff because that's the highest the IBM PC supports.

Makes sense. Cheers

9600 is what I remember from the terminals at school at that time, they had rooms of them for students, I think they went to a serial multiplexer of some sort in the room, then over ethernet to the host at the "computing center." Or maybe it was serial the whole way?

When our work was mostly dumb terminals, they would have a db25 to "rj45" adapter, then using a plain cat5 cable to a box called a terminal server (we used xyplex).

From the terminal server to the actual server was legit Ethernet, and we would address the terminals as a term-server-ip:port combination.

Terminal concentrators, which is what they were called, are hardware that the world has largely forgotten about.

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