[Suns-at-Home] Apple Terminal

[Ethan Dicks]

On 7/31/07, Ted Palmer <tedp@iprimus.com.au> wrote:
> Ben wrote:
>
> > All this talk lately about using old Apple machines as serial
> > terminals came to a head this weekend when a friend emailed me these
> > links saying "Seen these?"
>
> I have dealt enough with serial terminals over the years to have no
> remaining fascination for them.

I used to be on dumb terminals 8-10 hrs/day, but I still find them
preferable to some environments.

> I still have a genuine VT101 taking up space somewhere and a clone
> VT220 unit.

I have (and use) a variety of terminals - most recently, a tiny Planar
Systems "ELT-320" - 7" Electroluminescent flat panel, VT-320 features.
 I have a VT220 hanging off of a PDP-8/L, using its
now-impossible-to-find 20mA port.

Dumb terminals have their uses - I like the fact that they come up
quickly (especially without a tube), and do exactly what they are
supposed to do.  No emulation problems, no extra features... you type,
it displays.

> The VT101 probably uses more power and makes more heat
> than a hyperactive Pentium 4.

A VT101 consumes about 150W.  If your Pentium 4 has an LCD panel, I'll
accept that it might use less power, but not by much.  While a
light-loaded system doesn't max out the PSU, modern machines can
supply hundreds of watts (and don't forget to add in the CRT or LCD on
the PC at 50W to 150W all by itself, depending on the
size/technology).  Even a laptop isn't that much better than a VT100 -
most modern laptops come with 90W power supplies to charge the
battery, and sometimes a 70W travel adapter that will power the laptop
but not charge the battery.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article28-page4.html
http://vt100.net/docs/tp83/chapter5.html

As for heat - it's entirely possible that a 1980s 150W PSU throws more
heat than a modern 300W PSU, but if you add in the PC display, I think
it's a wash... plus the terminal is ready to use in seconds, and the
PC, no matter what OS, takes considerable time to boot.

> If I feel the need to carry a portable terminal, a Palm Vx with a
> custom serial cable and a bit of software can do the job.

Done that with a Palm III.  At that job, it was easier than finding a
place to balance a laptop, which is what the other guys tried to do.

> Seeing the serial boot output from a headless Sun server is about
> the only use for it I can think of.

I used my Palm III to reconfigure some Cisco gear.  The tech crew was
standing around, discussing what needed to be done, and as the boss
was waiting for one of us to fetch a laptop, I pulled the Palm out,
and was done before he could ask what I was doing.  When he _did_ ask,
I showed him the results on the Palm and his reaction was worth
carrying the gear around.  ;-)

> I think I might have used a modem with the Palm once to remotely
> dial into my 386 PC (running a UUCP leaf node on Coherent OS) just
> for the hell of it.

Wow.  Adding modems to the mix makes it a bit more painful.

> Using the Palm screen is only slightly less cumbersome than trying
> to type on an original VT10x keyboard.

I completely disagree.  The one thing that I didn't like about the
Palm was that the screen could only practically show 1/4 of the screen
at once.

> I think the most pointless thing I did with the VT101 was to redirect
> the command line console of a Windows 3.0 system to the serial port.
> It's not as easy as it sounds and not really useful anyway.

That sounds painful all by itself.  Back when I used my Amiga 1000
every day, I plugged my VT220 into it, fired off the AmigaOS
equivalent of  a getty ('newshell AUX:'), then wrote C programs on the
terminal while my housemates played "Silent Service" with the
monitor/mouse/keyboard.

The last time I plugged a dumb terminal into a UNIX box was when I was
running klh10, a PDP-10 (36 bit) emulator, and the regular xterm
window wasn't VT100-compatible enough to run emacs.  I fired off a
getty, plugged in some brand-X terminal that was lying around, and,
true to the nature of a dumb terminal, it rendered the control
sequences perfectly, something that many emulators have problems with.

Referencing back to the original examples, if I wanted to press
classic gear into service as a terminal, I'd probably dig out a CBM
8032, 80 column PET, and an IEEE-488 serial adapter, but except as a
demonstration, I don't see the point.  When I was using a C-64 to
connect to CompuServe, about 25 years ago, I _wished_ I could have
afforded a VT101; I don't see why I'd want to return to the days of
connecting to the outer world through a 1MHz 6502.

-ethan