Digital VT100 (1978) – Beautiful Vintage Terminal

Re:Digital VT100 (1978) – Beautiful Vintage Terminal by mattowen_uk on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @05:02AM (#25831768)

I love DEC VTs. Spent the first few years of my career as as a VAX sysadmin, and basically lived in front of various VT220s, 320s and 420s. Never got to use an original VT10x though.

I still hanker for a VT420 as they were the best - I can't afford one though[1], so I've had to settle for a Wyse WY-50 for my retro collection, which although is VT compatible, is not nearly as nice.

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[1] If you have one you want to sell, let me know!

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Re:Digital VT100 (1978) – Beautiful Vintage Terminal by vidarh on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @06:26AM (#25832357)

I've recently started writing a terminal emulator (because...) and it's surprising how many capabilities of even the vt10x's are not supported properly by most terminal emulators. Never mind the newer ones like the VT420 with ReGIS and Sixel support etc.

Terminals seems to have gone largely backwards in terms of capability. I guess largely because they're mostly used for the lowest common denominator, and beyond that people move to web/gui interfaces, and so little software requires a more capable terminal.

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Re:Digital VT100 (1978) – Beautiful Vintage Terminal by skissane on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @07:01AM (#25832585)

To get really accurate terminal emulation, you could get the firmware ROM off a real terminal and build an emulator that executes that firmware.

Someone's started doing that in MAME, for the DEC VT520, although I've never tried running it so don't know how well it works (if at all) – https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...

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Re:Digital VT100 (1978) – Beautiful Vintage Terminal by rvense on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @07:19AM (#25832734)

I have a VT510, non-graphical. It's a little dim, but I like it.

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