that was the first computer my father used for his business in irs in germany 1982. i programmed a game from a computer magazin. typed in hex code. it was a little spaceship that has to fly over a hill and land on a platform on the other side.
Worked great on CPM with Wordstar! The cursor movement was amazing. Jaw dropping. The next time I had that feeling was when I was handed a floppy with Doom on it about 15 years later.
You really haven’t lived until you’ve written a video game on a VT-100 using the cursor movement “escape sequences” to animate character-based sprites — in FORTRAN, of course 😹 to make the best use of the serial port at 19.2k baud. 🤓
On an LSI-11 (DEC’s “micro” computer still on the PDP-11 architecture… about the size of a VCR :)) running RT-11 as its OS. We had the full set of “orange binders” and it was an incredible eye-opener for 16-year-old-nerd-me 🤓 as to how a large s/w system is organized & doc’d. Halcyon days, indeed!
the cool thing is this is just a display, keyboard, and data connection. in theory you could use it to connect to a modern computer and use most programs that run in a terminal window
A lot of innovations in Human factors engineering. Such as the separate keyboard with a coiled cord, and smooth scrolling. Blinking text was on about 75% of the time, vs the usual 50%, meaning it easier to read.
There's an optional 'click' you can enable on each keypress.
The 'break' key, which you never want to push by accident, had a stronger spring in it, which made it pretty much impossible to push by accident. Why can't we have that in num-lock keys (and F1 for that matter)?
Another detail: printing an 80th character on the line in most terminals would cause an auto line feed, since the cursor couldn't move to column 81. In the vt100, the cursor would stay in column 80, but it was really in column 81 internally. When you added another char it would go the next line.
Practically, this means you could send lines of text with full 80 chars to a vt100 and they would show as expected; with other terminals you'd get blank lines after each one. Also means you could print something in the lower right corner and have it stay there, which was impossible on many terminals
And the effect of combining character effects (underline, bold, blink, reverse..) was actually designed and thought out properly, not just 'do it in the minimum number of gates'.
Really seems to have been designed by people who would be using it.
Beep innovation: terminals beep when you send a ctrl-G character, just as teletypes would ring the little bell.
Most terminals: "be beeping if a ^G has been received in the last ¼ second (or whatever time), otherwise hush". ...
There were VT320s first, but you're correct, Smarterm followed on for many people. There were still a fair number of VTs in use until about 2010 though.
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Sometimes i wonder about reversed technology. just like when the microwave came out :)
The DEC PDP “smart” minicomputers are said to have inspired the designs of both the Intel x86 and Motorola 68000 CPUs.
So the unique design of a whole computer inspired the design of CPU chips.
There's an optional 'click' you can enable on each keypress.
Really seems to have been designed by people who would be using it.
Most terminals: "be beeping if a ^G has been received in the last ¼ second (or whatever time), otherwise hush". ...
Does anyone restore and use teletype computers? That is what I started with in the 70s.
to this day I think they aren't real computers unless they have a HERE IS button