[TUHS] First CRT terminal on Unix?

Random832 random832 at fastmail.com
Thu Nov 23 05:39:32 AEST 2017


On Wed, Nov 22, 2017, at 12:55, Henry Bent wrote:
> In short: the VT05 was DEC's first video terminal, from the early
> '70s, and would have presumably been in use at some installations that
> used early Unix.  My guess - and this is entirely a guess - is that it
> had been entirely supplanted by the VT52 and friends by the time Unix
> gained widespread popularity.
>
> There is a pretty good overview of the VT05 at
> https://vt100.net/dec/vt05.html and
> http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT05 has a plethora of
> pictures.
>
> I have no idea why there are no termcap/terminfo entries for the VT05.
> stty in BSD as early as 2.79 understands "vt05" as a settings
> argument, but it's not clear to me what you would use for $TERM.

Looking at other versions, stty vt05 appears as far back as V6 (it sets
the newline delay - needed because scrolling was slow on the VT05 - and
clears other delays). This is evidence that it was probably used some
places as a dumb terminal.

The VT05 itself was 72x20, all uppercase, and did in fact support cursor
addressing etc, though there's no evidence any Unix applications ever
took advantage of that. TECO apparently did, though.



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