[SGVLUG] Real Dumb Terminal Woes

[David Lawyer]

On 1/24/06, Don Saxton <dsaxton at pacbell.net> wrote:
> I got some experience finding a text terminal ...

You mean emulated terminal of type "Linux".  It's not a real text
terminal like I'm using now.  The rains we had resulted in a number of
my keys sticking so I got them to pop back up by banging the keyboard
on the table but wrecked the keyboard since hitting any key caused
it to repeat a few times.  So I'm now using a spare keyboard that I
melted in the oven a few years ago trying to dry it out when it got
wet in the rain.  (I set the oven at a low temp of about 100 deg. F
but the temp. distribution due to heat rays was non-uniform.)  I do my
computing outdoors and it's really scary during a windstorm with all
the tree branches falling down.  But I sit under an umbrella which was
hit a number of times.

The melting only melted the plastic keyboard frame so I swapped the
frames and also swapped a broken key.  I'm now back in business with
my keyboard created by swapping parts, but now I don't have much in
reserve for any future failures.  It's a  CIT-101e terminal.   Only a
keyboard for the 101e will work since a chip inside the keyboard has
this written on it.  The terminal is so old that the date on the label
has worn off but the manual is from 1983.  Anyway, perhaps it's time
to upgrade to a newer terminal after 23 years.  New ones cost $400 +,
almost the price of a low-end PC.

When certain libraries were getting rid of text-terminals, I asked for
one but only got one from Caltech which was a "Wyse" brand and failed
a few times, with the last failure being difficult to diagnose.  The
one I use has a reputation for high quality (except if the keyboard
gets wet).  So I would like to find another real text terminal.

I really like using a text terminal since the text has good resolution
so it's easy for me to read without eyeglasses.  Also, I don't worry
about it being stolen even though it's left outside where anyone could
walk in from the street and take it.

Regarding logging in via a serial port, you need to edit /etc/inittab
so that getty will run on that serial port after the system boots.  It
would be nice if hot-plug could continuously probe the serial ports and
detect what is there but this is pretty complicated since there are
so many different brands/models of dumb terminals.  Different
terminals could respond to identification requests with the same
identification code.  For example, the CIT101e will say it's a VT100
but it isn't exactly at VT100 but sort-of compatible with VT100.

		David Lawyer