[TUHS] Teletype

[Brian Zick]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon at orthanc.ca>
wrote:

>
> On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Brian Zick <brian at zickzickzick.com> wrote:
>
> > Would it still be possible today for someone like me to go out, and find
> an old teletype terminal (an old ASR or DECwriter or something), set up a
> phone line and modem and get a roll of paper, and then actually use it to
> connect to other computers?
> >
> > I know it's not really practical today - but is it possible?
>
> Certainly it's possible.  Although you would really only be able to do it
> with an ASCII terminal.  A DECwriter would work fine.  For a Teletype
> beast, you would need to make sure it used ASCII.  But lacking lower case,
> I think you would find it too painful to use, even though all the current
> versions of UNIX (and Linux) I'm aware of still seem to support the
> necessary case conversion in the tty drivers.
>

​Hmm. So for a TTY that old there would probably be no option for
lowercase. That does sound a little painful, especially if I wanted to edit
modern programs..​


> Your biggest obstacle might be finding a host machine that still has a
> modem attached that you could dial in to :-)
>

​So perhaps I could simplify it and attach to a machine sitting next to the
TTY - which then in theory could connect to the outside world via the usual
means. I wonder, has anyone tried something like this?
​

> And, of course, everyone KNOWS the entire universe runs in terminals that
> support ANSI escape sequences for colour and cursor positioning.  Who needs
> termcap?  (I'm looking at you, git. And clang.)  So you might find setting
> TERM=dumb isn't quite enough.
>
> Also, ed(1) is a wonderful editor on a hardcopy terminal.  Unless you run
> it on Linux, which KNOWS the whole world runs on 24 line terminal windows,
> and therefore ed needs to pause its output.


​I usually use vim, but before learning vim I learned ed and used it for
about a 2 month space for editing config files and things, so that should
hopefully be the easy part. :-)​


Brian Zick
zickzickzick.com

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