[SunRescue] Dumb Term

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, May 21, 2001 at 23:01:20 (EDT), dave at cca.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Dumb Term
>
> Did any of those vt100-with-a-microprocessor-crammed-in machines
> do well in the market? There were PDP-8, PDP-11, and Z80 versions,
> right? Did people consider them to be good personal computers in
> their day?

I've got a VT180 (i.e. the VT100 with z80, with dual 5.25" floppy
drives).  I never got around to finding the CP/M diskettes for it, and
since it worked just as well as a "dumb terminal" I used it as such (its
one with a switching power supply so even better/lighter/cooler than the
older ones!  :-).  I need to repair a blown electrolytic on the video
board again though....

There must have been quite a few in cirulation.  Back when I would have
liked to have had my own CP/M machine I think the VT180 would have been
a dream machine.  Much better than the Apple-II with z80 card I used one
summer long ago....

> An early teleray is a glass tty (no cursor control). I don't see a 
> hell of a lot of difference between a vt52 and vt220, personally.
> Yeah, the 220 can handle downloadable fonts and does better scrolling
> region kinda stuff. La la la, who cares. :-) For what text terminals
> are used for 99.9% of the time, a vt52 and a vt220 are the same.

exactly -- only tiny degrees of smartness there....  Even an AT&T-705
with multi-session support isn't much beyond "dumb"  :-)

Now the DMD-5620 (aka blit aka jerq) is a real blend of dumb terminal by
default with full general purpose programmability in the extreme.  Too
bad they didn't put anything faster than 19.2k rs232 on it.... 4 MIPS
32-bit CPU with 1MB RAM (when expanded)!

The more I think about it the more I'm sure the phrase "dumb terminal"
didn't come into vogue until PCs, workstations, and X11/etc., came into
common use.  That's when you had to distinguish between a more general
purpose personal computing devices with a terminal emulator and
something that would only ever act as a terminal.

> On the other hand, you can barricade a door a lot better with a decwriter
> than with a vt220.  Depends on your needs.

Been there, done that (with the decwriter-III, that is)!  ;-)

gotta keep those meddling system managers out of the machine roome some how!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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