I think it's worth mentioning that in France they had Minitel, a system run by the Postal Office that put a terminal in every household in the early 80s. What started as a way to save money by having the phonebook in a computer instead of printing millions of copies each year ended up becoming a proto-internet of sorts, with people sending emails and doing online shopping. It even had the same problems as the internet but 2 decades early, like a start-up bubble and controversy about pornography to minors
You can even access the serial port on some models, so it's still usable as a terminal for a linux PC, although with that keyboard, not a very good one x)
Funny that they were trying to do away with phonebooks all the way back then yet still in 2023 I receive a phonebook in the mail once a year. It just seems like such a waste to still do that. I'd guess around 99 percent of people who get them throw them straight in the trash or put them on a shelf where they will sit never to be used. As much as I like things from the past there is no reason to have phonebooks anymore. First of all the white pages are listings of people who still have standard land-line phones which is hardly anyone nowadays. And as for the yellow pages I can find the number of any business I want in a matter of seconds on google. I used to say they should still make them but only for people who call and specify that they want one. Nowadays though I think they should just stop making them entirely. How many people is the phonebook actually useful for? Even old people have cellphones now.
@@kaktusgoreng What's interesting is that it was so successful that it actually slowed down the adoption of the Internet in France. These terminals were free and access was affordable (same price per minute as your average telephone call), so millions of households had one. They were also designed to basically last forever, since the technology was stagnant. When the Internet came along in the '90s, you had to buy an expensive PC for it (that would be outdated in a few years) and to many, it just didn't seem worth the hassle, given that all of the online services they were using were available anyway. Since Minitel allowed private firms to offer services for it however, these companies had no trouble transitioning to the Internet once it came along, given that they already had experience with online services.
I can recall as a small child, my mom coming home from work (at Sears) telling us that they were going to formally train her to "run the teletype machine". She was excited for it because it also came along with a small pay bump. 🙂
That must have been a very cute moment of personal history. Wish I could magically go back to that time and have my healthy 12 year old body again. I'd have more fun with it all this time around.
Thanks for not assuming that everyone who watches your channel knows all this, but yet showing the information in a fun and interesting way! Always a joy to watch your content and your genuine passion for all things tech.
The video called “The Mother of All Demos” from 1968 is a phenomenal video for vintage computer enthusiasts to watch. It demonstrated a video terminal to a live audience of 2,000 people, with the ability to edit text.
The Mother of All Demos is the first demonstration of a computer mouse and of a graphical user interface (GUI). That technology was licensed to XEROX who used it to develop the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star. Xerox licensed the technology to Apple and they used it in the Mac.
@@wmtrader No technology was "licensed", by either party, as GUI concepts was not considered patentable at the time. Apple stole most of the design for the Lisa/Macintosh GUI, including the central desktop metaphor, without any kind of authorisation, from the Xerox Star well after their visit to Xerox Parc to see the Alto.
@@amazing7633 They did a fully working operating system and word processor with it. But the machine was too expensive at the time to reach a big market, so commercial success for such systems needed to wait a few more years for chips to become more affordable.
@@amazing7633 actually, they knew it very well. They marketed professional workstations for desktop publishing that did things that Macs would do 10 years later. The problem is that these were expensive products that targeted big companies. They were looking for a personal computer manufacturer with an established brand that could market a cheaper version to individuals. That's where Jobs stepped in and did a tremendous job in creating a stripped down and more user friendly version of their OS that could run on cheaper machines. But Xerox was actually well aware of what they had created and of the fact that it would be the future. They were so confident in their technology that they allowed Apple to pay them with future shares emissions, as Apple didn't have enough cash. Bottom line: they perfectly knew what they had created and what to do with it.
As a sysadmin, I still use terminals; not only during regular operations with virtual terminals, but when a system is seemingly unresponsive, the hosting provider can provide a serial connection to the faulty server and this gets piped as-is into a terminal emulator through internet. Same for virtual machines; we can setup a virtual serial port for the guest system, and literally pipe that from the host to get a working shell from the kernel even though SSH and sometimes virtual display are broken. It's very useful, as it's very basic and does not requires much working parts.
@@flametitan100 It can even run operating environments like Windows 3, although that might be for the Windows Entertainment Pack to run correctly. I've also used it to run Word 5.5 for DOS.
There were also X-Terminals (e.g the NCD19 from 1989) that acted just like dumb terminals but displayed graphics from Unix servers via the X11 protocol.
Hi 8 Bit Guy, I'm old and used dumb terminals at Texas Instruments but it's been so very long that I learned stuff too from your great video. Thank you so much. I feel very privileged that my life went from punch cards to cloud. It was an incredible journey.
I still technically use a terminal to this day. Instead of a dedicated, single use device, we have thin client computers running an IBM 5250 terminal program to connect to an IBM Power7 which is essentially a modern IBM AS/400. Works for us since our software was all written in the 1980's in COBOL and we still use it today, have even integrated it into the modern web. Terminals aren't dead, they are just taking a different form!
Many people would quibble about calling a thin client a terminal, but of course that somewhat ignores the transition-period “smart terminals” with extremely limited local computation. You’re 100% correct that they’re the same spirit!
Alot of healthcare and insurance companies still use the AS/400 or equivalent, my job right now in healthcare uses it mainly for time keeping (KRONOS) , but whenever we had to reset passwords for managers, we would have to use a terminal emulator. Although i did use real terminals back in the early 2000s as a furniture manufacturer as they did all data entry into an actual AS/400 midrange, we had a bunch of 3178/3179/and 3180 terminals. along with PCs using your standard software terminals and a few PC's that were not on the network using a hardware terminal emulator (connects to the twinax connection that the dumb terminals would use)
Healthcare or banking? Only two industries I can think of that this but my guess is banking since the code is COBOL. Always thought if the some of the tools I use today to help code had really caught on when COBOL was common it would still be useful for a lot of systems. Graphics not so much but really how much low level graphics does anyone actually write even today?
The NASA mission control screens aren't really terminals but basically TVs; They received a video signal that was a live from a video camera that combined computer output and pre-rendered outputs
That was the case for the big, "wall type" screens, those were part video projection and part computer output. But the terminals seen at each mission control desk were something different, those were called "charactrons", video tubes which could display a fixed set of characters or even graphics. Each of these tubes were used with hardwired logic, that can change the display to a certain degree, obviously to display varying values, but also switching "pages" for different displays. But their function was pretty much "baked in", for whatever telemetry was needed for the controller, so you couldn't just, for example use the CAPCOM displays for FIDO...
@@soriac2357 thanks for the explanation. I was thinking I remembered something like that from an old video of Fran, but I really thought it described the Crt screens. Cool to know the details now.
In the video they where not saying NASA was using terminals. But that the concept of having computer screens was kinda advanced at that time. He was giving an example of where tech was ahead of science fiction to some extent.
Wow! Brings back memories of early Silicon Valley when there were still fruit trees between the little office buildings. I worked at Tymeshare between '74-'77. thermal paper and teletypes. Later, wrote a lot of COBOL on dumb terminals. Blue/green bar paper. Mountains of it. The stone age. Thanks so much for this.
I worked security in Silicon Valley in the late 70s. Tymeshare was one of my patrol stops. Later on, I worked at the old Pacific Telephone, then Pacific Bell, and became the go-to guy in my office to pull COBOL-based reports on those dumb terminals printed out on bar paper. Good times. 😁
Before ethernet, each of these terminals were linked by a dedicated serial/parallel cable to the main computer. That's why those suspended floors were needed for
Ethernet is named after the AETHER, which is a more accurate understanding of the nature of this realm than the present "space-time" hoax they've been pushing. Some of the best advances in technology were made when people just knew that there is an invisible substance of unknown specifics that fills what we perceive as empty space...and even today, because it is not openly discussed, advances have been made that benefit a few.
I dare to say, relatively thin serial cables and network cables can go in trays above the inner ceiling, but raised floor enable piping for the cooling system for the cooling as well as heavy power cables to be routed out of sight and away from stumbling feet...
And remember that IBM Mainframe (and other IBM compatible systems) used Bus and Tag cables to connect the disk and terminal controllers to the main CPU complex, These were thick and heavy cables that you wouldn't run overhead if you could avoid it. The sort-of rule of thumb was that if it was a data processing or computer machine room, the cables would go down under a raised floor (which also hid not just pipes for water-cooled systems, but also air ducts for air cooled systems), and if it was a telecommunication machine room (like a telephone exchange), the cables would go up to trays suspended from the roof, and the floor would be solid concrete (mechanical switching gear was heavy!). This has tended to break down over the last couple of decades, and now many computer rooms use overhead cables. This is mainly due to not needing individual cables per terminal (just network cables), and also the fact that often comms equipment like network and SAN switches are installed in the racks with the computers (so a lot of the cables are just restricted to inside individual racks), just needing trunks links between the racks. Also fibre-optic cables are often used, which are much lighter, and have much higher data bandwidth than older types of cables.
So true! My fist job was as a "Field Engineer" with Burroughs, installing miles of cables under the raised flooring. All kinds of cables down there, but the largest quantities were the hundreds of serial cables (full 25-conductor RS232 cables!) , running from the DTE boxes (don't recall the name, but each one could handle 32 lines, or later 64 lines) out to the racks of modems. And also the huge cables for interconnecting the mainframes to the printers, card readers, SPOs, and banks of disk packs, tape drives, and HPT disks. Those were the days! A favorite prank with those cables among the older field engineers was to send the newbie out the engineering storage area, for a "cable stretcher", when the cables weren't quite able to reach their destination... Yup, we sure did have a LOT of cables down there. An nothing at all "overhead", as some have suggested. The ceiling area in those data center machine rooms was all HVAC and fire suppression stuff. No cabling related to the mainframes.
I love the layers of abstraction: a modern, graphical interface emulates a text-mode window that emulates a dumb terminal that emulates a teletype. EDIT: of course the whole thing probably runs in a virtual machine with virtual memory. Not sure when reality gets involved!
I always find amazing to see some formats or commands that we are still using today in different OSs, like "DIR" or "-RW-RW-R--" I'd like to watch a video about the evolution of the basic commands like "CD", "DIR", "MKDIR", "RMDIR", "PING", etc...
What simply made it hard to use screens for text for a while was lack of good internal memory for the screens. NASA actually used physical overlays for most of the text and a display for numbers, this was recorded by a camera and multiplexed (read: made into TV channels) onto the displays in mission control
That and the screen flickering (in movies and TV shows). In every movie where they actually used computer screens you can see the bad effects that different framerates have.
@@leap123_ 24FPS has not necessarily been the standard since digital projection became ubiquitous. There are so many caveats and a lot of nuance, but it is film projection which actually was standardised at 24fps. Cameras had long since already had variable control over frame rate, and filmmakers commonly utilised that for artistic and practical purposes. An experienced camera operator could try to match the frame rate on the screen, but mechanical vs electrical limitations can and most probably will still end up being off.
Early terminals often had to use delay line or shift-register memory, making them quite complicated. During most of the screen, you could only access the specific character being displayed, and that required lots of tricky timing to update the display. The time period where directly addressable memory became affordable, but a dedicated CPU was not yet affordable was rather narrow, and ended in the late '70s.
A lot of the older teletypes shown in the first part of the video (Model 15, 28KSR, and even 28ASR) were rebuilt in the late '60s and early '70s to be used with acoustic modems so deaf people could 'call' each other on the phone. I don't know if it still holds true anymore, but as late as the 1990s, there were some older deaf people in my area that had one lurking in a forgotten corner of their basement or garage...
Thanks for calling the 13th Floor BBS! (Although it could hardly be considered "calling" these days considering it's not dial-up anymore, I suppose.) [13:22]
I saw that and was like I CALL THERE!! I saw the phone phreaking episode but would love to see some coverage of the pre 1990 BBS scene, commodore especially.
@@JTDoyle-qj4oz I'd like to see that as well. It was a huge community and oddly enough just about everyone who was involved in it turned out to work in IT in some form or fashion.
Terminal interfacing is still very much alive and relevant in modern IT. I’ve been a network engineer for ~27 years now. The vast majority of the equipment I work with every day still supports a physical serial connection to a terminal. Obviously this is almost always a terminal emulator these days, but a ‘dumb’ serial terminal would still work. When everything is at-least partially working properly, we can forego the serial connection and use IP (usually SSH) to emulate the serial connection over a network connection. But we always keep a serial connection handy for when lower level access is needed.
Indeed. I've connected up and used serial interfaces on things like routers and IP cameras and other devices without network shell access, to rescue or gain access to the OS (often to enable ssh, telnet, ftp, tftp, etc.) Sometimes a serial connector header would have to be soldered in place first into the unpopulated points on the motherboard. It's amazing just how many devices are just mini/embedded Linux machines, much less powerful than a Raspberry PI yet still doing their things. Edit: typo
@@nickwallette6201Even Cisco routers and network switches are configured in this manner. The devices you are talking about are Juniper network switches and Palo Alto Networks firewalls.
I remember my dad’s office at the Bethlehem Steel Corporate site and him calling down to the “computer”room to retrieve sales figures for his terminal. He’d do the work on a separate calculator and put the entries back into the terminal. When I was there before and after school, he’d give me a piece a paper and tell me to go to the computer room and find certain data tapes. At 7-12 years old, I learned how to spool those data tapes (under supervision, of course).
Great nostalgic topic for me. As a home health nurse in the 1990s we had dummy terminals at our agency that were connected to a AS 400 IBM computer located in the hospital. We were sternly warned always to log off the terminals every time we used them for if the units were shutdown by flipping the power switch or if the power went out the whole system likely would crash. I was amazed at how well the whole system of 30 terminals worked. The terminals were spread out across town, connected by dedicated phone lines. We used the system for ordering supplies, basic word processing, for entering forms to be transferred to the US government for reimbursement. However, in those early days I accidentally typed in a global record delete that began to rapidly erase every patient in succession from “A” to “Z”. I could see the names flashing by on the terminal so I flipped the power switch which surprisingly interrupted the loop. Three temporary secretaries were hired to re type about 280 records up to the letter “R” which took several days to enter. I kept silent about my mistake!
The first terminals I saw were in 1972 at the office where I registered for college. They had a whole room full of people using them. It seemed very futuristic. But as students we had to use teletypes and card readers...
terminal emulators even began to emulate physical terminals themselves for added compatibility. You can also still use TTY to this day, in fact Linux pretty much only supports TTY and everything is rendered on top a session of it
To riff on the end bit, the "terminal" software available in Linux and Mac has much more than a skin deep connection to this history. Its operating system architectures date from the period of true dumb terminals, with files like /dev/tty (standing for "teletype") to manage connections to user sessions, and it still supports the same escape sequences of characters that were used back in the day to move the cursor, change colors, etc. If you have one of these devices, you can most likely connect it to a modern Linux system (possibly with some work to enable insecure legacy stuff) and use it to log in and run programs just like 40+ years ago.
Yeah, I remember setting up a machine with the serial port added to inittab and a null modem cable to a machine which I could run a terminal on . This was probably my most secure machine at the time, stripped down to run only the essentials ,
Indeed! This is a core component of why we can use computers without features like keyboards and displays, now known as "headless". One obscure bit of compatibility is for upper case only terminals like the one in Apple 1; logging in with an all upper case username tells getty to switch on case translation modes, as with "stty olcuc iuclc". Otherwise you couldn't type most Unix commands, as they are lower case.
It's trivial to enable, and not insecure! You get a login: prompt just like you do on a virtual console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn, where you can choose F1 through F7. 7 virtual consoles are the default, and your graphical session (and graphical login screen, in some configurations) will use one. For all the others, you'll just see the virtual console number, hostname, and a friendly login prompt!
That takes me back, the first computer I used was a Cromemco System 3, with an ADM3. Thinking about VDUs in the valve era, they probably could have used storage CRTs, like RADAR, and vector graphics, which would be less demanding on the storage, it would have been a lot like drum or mercury delay line memory.
Happy to see Datapoint mentioned. I'd love to see an entire video about them. I feel they deserve to be better remembered considering the amount of new ideas they brought into computing.
I worked for a few years with Datapoint computers. The company had three at different sites (one in Norway) that were, for the time, advanced small stand-alone computers that could connect up by modem when required and transmit files to and from another stand-alone machine in the main office, which wrote it to mag tape which was read by the mainframe. Sounds pretty silly today, but it worked and I guess was worth it. I certainly enjoyed it.
In the early '80's if you dialed Merrill Lynch's 800 number it would be answered by someone with a Datapoint terminal. The terminal included a telephone handset.
I worked for Data-100 and supported the printers and card punches and card readers at Bendix Guidance, Bendix Flight and Bendix Aviation in Teterboro, NJ. This terminal equipment was connected to a mainframe in Southfield, MI. Teterboro was known as Bendix Borough for six years.'37 to '43.
I was upgraded from a VT220 to a VT330 when I worked at Digital in the late 1980s. The DEC Rainbow and Digital DECmate II and III also had great terminal emulators in them. They allowed me to take a VT100 home back then so I could dial in at night if I needed to. It was pretty nifty.
My first job out of college was as a system manager for VAX/VMS mini computers. We had some DECWriter (teletypes) but also many VT220s. VMS was (and is) a great operating system!
Data displays were made in the 50’s and 60’s for military applications. Look up a Charachtertron. There was no digital pixel set to create as they used a physical mask to create the characters and they could write a whole screen of text with it. The founder of a company I used to do work for designed and built the first ones for the Convair corporation in the 50’s I believe. Later there was a typotron tube but it worked on a slightly different principal.
Minor nerd quibble (the best kind in Star Trek); the computer occasionally shows text in the conference room when they look at people’s files, such as Harry Mudd or Kodos the Executioner’s criminal records. They also showed text on the bridge a couple times on those larger monitors near the ceilings. Such as Roger Korby or Gary Mitchell’s files. The wider point about the bridge, engineering etc almost entirely having graphs and status lights rather than text still stands though ;)
Just about any monitor on the Enterprise was multi modal, and could display text, graphics, and full motion video, with sound, anything the episode writers wanted. Although, it was actually done through a bit of film magic called the overlay.
@@dougbrowning82 they were definitely thinking ahead of the times with it! Even though all the bridge monitors could probably in-universe show anything, I wanted to be ultra-specific about where they usually did the overlay in post. I guess I could’ve mentioned the map of the Romulan Neutral Zone on the viewscreen!
I always assumed the colorful pictures of nebulae and planets on the bridge in TOS to be actual monitors, that were only presented by the set designers as still pictures due to studio budget and available technology at that time. I guess, using a complicated projection system to emulate such a futuristic device for simple background usage was way above their time and money budget. One Episode costed already $190,000 (~$1.4 million in today's money).
Yeah... and there was a couple episodes where there was a bunch of data and the computer would print it out and it made no noise as I recall. I grew up around weird old government/science computers in the 70's and 80's and that sound of the computer is definitely not a teletype printer. To me that is the sound of core memory when those old computers were running programs. Be it I was a little kid around those machines but that is what I remember and have always associated it with. I doubt anyone has any core memory systems that still work today so it's impossible to test if my ancient childhood memory is correct.
I remember the computer card catalog at the libraries growing up. You would "use the terminal" to find the books. It took me later in life to realize how it worked, that there was a mainframe somewhere that the terminals were all hooked up to. I just now remembered using my computer at home to dial into the library, and using the terminal just like using it at the library. Wow, tech sure has progressed.
Yep. I remember there still being some around at some of the branches of our county library system even in the early 2000s. They tied into the same system that the GUI-based Windows apps and, later, Web-based interfaces used. Especially when they were built directly into the architecture; it would be quite some time before you could cram a Windows PC into the same tight space. Oh, and the bookmobile used a terminal connected to a radio antenna to handle checking stuff in and out. I remember that they sometimes had to unpark and repark a few times to establish a solid connection that wasn't blocked by the trees and weather.
Many of these terminals had CPUs, ROM, and RAM similar to home computers of the era. The VT240 (a fairly common terminal in it's day) had a 7.5MHz DEC T-11 CPU, the same CPU Atari used in their arcade cabinets! It's like how the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had a 1MHz 6502 CPU that was every bit as powerful as the Commdore 64 it was connected to.
This is fascinating stuff, David! I had never stopped to think about no text on screens in older shows and movies! This simply wasn’t a concept in people’s minds then as you said, but we can’t imagine a world without it now.
Even though I lived through this era (I’m 60) I never noticed that text on terminals started. It just seemed natural at the time. Maybe it’s because us software people saw it as going from punch cards to terminals and had seen the NASA stuff. The programmers of the 60’s & 70’s were so happy to ditch the cards and teletype style stuff they didn’t spend time thinking about what was really a huge evolutionary event in computing. Edit to say I’m not old enough to programmed professionally in 70’s was just in awe of the elders at work. I knew a guy that started working as a payroll programmer on an IBM System 3. His employer bought the computer and software. He got the job of figuring out how to make it work because his degree was in mathematics and he had just started working in accounting
@@Jen39x I learned to program on punched cards (ForTran), but my first jobs in the field were in the 80s. I learned 6502 on an Atari 800, and they needed Apple II tools. That was my foot in the door to a career. On to the 8088 PC after that. ASM for that CPU was cake after the 6502.
Nicely crafted episode. Initially I was like "Meh, I know what a terminal is", but you still managed to make it interesting and have a nice run through history with a good pacing.
I work in a field where our users still operate terminal sessions, even though they may not know exactly what they are! Can't wait to use this video to give our folks a little background on why the "old tech" we operate has been so useful for so long!
Interesting history lesson on how we got from teletypes to terminals. One thing to keep in mind is that PCs still run as terminals to this day, just smarter...not just the command line interface that you showed, but any time we talk to another machine over the internet, it's still basically the same thing. It's just that the protocol has become more sophisticated and more complex than 'just' the old ANSI codes. And then someone figured out how to send actual runnable pieces of code over the connection to be run locally instead of on the remote system.
I remember replacing this things with thin clients during vocational training (right before i went of to study information technology)…wow, this brings back memories 😁👍
I used one in the dorm commons at the U of Wyoming in 1990. Set up an account on the VAX to run a statistical analysis package for a polisci class. Got my output on paper in a basket labeled with the first initial of my last name at the now-demolished Ivinson Building, where all that was located. I didn’t understand it at the time, but that account also gave me email and internet access (such as it was back then).
Sounds very much like my experience at the University of Iowa starting in 1992. The dorm computer labs had a mixture of terminals and computers. I did get the email account and learned how to telnet to servers like ISCA BBS and Usenet before there was much you could do on the WWW. I was happy to use the terminals if the computers were taken since it was all text-based anyway. I got an account on all the computer servers they offered, even though I didn't know anything about mainframe systems. I taught myself how to use Unix from the man pages. I never got much into the Vax system - it was too unlike DOS for me to figure out. I even convinced my parents to get a dialup Compuserve account so I could email them, which we did so regularly.
My first experience with a "real" computer was my freshman year in college, where I was a CS major (back then, you were really a Math major with a certain specialty). It was used in my FORTRAN programming class and consisted of several DEC VT100 terminals connected to a DEC PDP 11 "minicomputer." Loved those DEC VT-series terminals. _Great_ keyboards on them.
It is wild how back then you really needed to know what you were doing to be able to use a computer. Technology moved so fast back then. You might go to college and learn all about how to use computers and in just a few years time all the information would be outdated. I'd say it wasn't until Windows 9x that your average person could use a computer without too much trouble. Windows 3.1 was a big step ahead but you still had to have a little knowledge of the system to really be able to use it. Once Windows XP came out then anyone and their grandma could use the computer pretty easily. It has been almost 22 years since XP came out and things really haven't changed that much compared to how it was back in the 80s and 90s.
10:48 - That's a great explanation. Reminds me of MIDI use with keyboards. I can set up a MIDI controller to a synth and use that to play (control) the synth, but on its own, the MIDI controller does absolutely nothing. The lights may be all on, but without a synth to echo data (music) through my monitors, the MIDI controller can be thought of as a dumb terminal.
I'll be aging myself here. I went to high school in Utah and we were fortunate enough to have a two year program for computer science and programming. The majority of the systems we used were the still fairly new Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 computers. We had one Commodore Pet as well which nobody used (I wish I had that now). In one corner of the room was a teletype machine. This connected to the Univac mainframe at the University of Utah and one could program in Basic, Cobol, and I think Fortran. Obviously it wasn't the most popular system to use, but I did do a few assignments on it just to try it out. Anyone with an account on the mainframe also had an e-mail address assigned. I never got an e-mail, though I wish I had because that mainframe was one of the original Arpanet nodes. So in theory, I could have gotten an actual e-mail Form a system in another state before there was an 'internet'.
I remember using VT320 at my University. They were connected to a DEC VAX 8500 and runs VMS. Also we used Prime Terminals and Volker Craig terminal connected to a Prime computer.
Wonderful episode, David. I love your history episodes, even those, like this one, that cover stuff many of us nerds already know quite a bit about. My first few jobs had me working at a VT100 or VT220 terminal extensively and I loved the amber text on a black screen. Good times. Today I keep a look out for old WYSE terminals to use with my 6502-based projects. Thank you for a wonderful stroll down terminal lane.
What is interesting is those modern terminal apps you see in modern OS behave exactly like an old teletype, like in the sense that when you see what you type is the program echoing back the characters.
Amazing how terminals used to be big expensive machines that tons of places used. Now all that can be done in a small program included with the OS and hardly anyone uses it or even knows what it is for nowadays.
You can still run minicom on Linux, through a serial port to another Linux system to get that old time UNIX feel. I have an old ThinkPad with a 4:3 display that I've done that with. 🙂
I have always been fascinated by terminals and mainframes. It's such an interesting concept that we still have these days with exchange servers and all manners of communication and file sharing systems for inter-office use when that was exactly what mainframes did most places. To think back in those days it was a lot simpler to setup when nowadays to achieve that you have to maintain a massive software stack.
My first IT job was looking after one of the first Mainframe and Terminal setups. the Honeywell DPS6. Often used in Government "establishments" as was the one i looked after. With over 3000 terminals all on 10mb Fibre. This was in 1987, Ours was used to connect to a database and it was actually amazingly fast. Any searches that were input were responded to in just seconds.
Same ere, out original set up was via 2400 modem , the server was about 60 miles away Later we used cluster controllers holding up to 24 terminals per cluster and each cluster has 9600 modem 4 - wire or full duplex private line ( not dial up ) Screen response was very good, i dont recall any screen enquires taking more than 3 to 5 seconds for a update, the system would have had minimum 80 users per site , so about 1600 users on the host server Even a full screen of 80x24 is about 2k - that does not take long to transfer even at 2400. Take into account the escape sequence that will clear the screen, and the internal memory would through up the blank enquiry form, then populate the field with a home command / data 1 / tab / data 2 / tab data 3 etc
10 megabit fiber? Wow! I bet that was insane back in 1987. Up until 2022 my internet speed was only 3mbps! I realize your 10mbps connection was just the internal network but still that seems like insane speed for 87.
@@HerecomestheCalavera I am not sure when fibre was available, i known in my senario we serial / copper wiring until co-axial was introduced from 1985 to 1992, then some larger buildings internal wiring went to fiber optic. By that time, all internal became cat 5 as novell was phased out and ethernet was adopted - we did have fiber connecting adjoining buildings together
@The 8-Bit Guy I've watched your channel for years now, and this is by far the BEST video you've ever done...I gotta say. I know, I'm biased, but still...excellent video!!!
I remember working on VT-320 terminals tied to VAX clusters at a DuPont plant. At the same time, we had a large IBM 3090 mainframe on site which included an assortment of terminals, including several 3270s which weighed a ton! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I remember using a terminal back when I worked at Pizza Hut. This particular store in 2003 consisted of a windows 95 machine for a server that had nine terminals connected. Not all of them had keyboards but instead had six button pads on the line to control the orders that were on screen. As you can imagine if that silly 95 machine went down the whole store would grind to a halt until it rebooted. Ironically enough I noticed recently that some of that software from back then is still in use. I believe it is only used as timekeeping but still was odd to see it.
My grandfather used to run the records department for the local university and did a lot of data entry. At first, it was punch cards. In fact, they still used them on occasion up into the 80s. I remember him sitting me in front of a terminal with a green monochrome screen and showed me a dog chasing a cat. He typed the word dog then cat and then scrolled back to the beginning of the word dog and held down the space bar. We even had a modem in the house, the old kind you had to put the phone handle onto, so he could deal with issues at work without driving several miles back to the office.
@@RaymondHng Hmm, not sure I ever heard the name before. I'm 44 now and that was when I was like 8, so even if I had heard it then, I wouldn't remember. Thanks.
@@Craxin01 I’ve been using computers since 1974. Anderson Jacobson was a manufacturer of those modems where the telephone handset is seated inside two rubber cups. Those are acoustic couplers. Two models were the AJ 311 and AM 211.
@@RaymondHng Wow! 1974? My mom was 16 then, hadn't even met my dad then. My earliest computer experience was an Apple IIe followed by a TRS-80. Didn't have a computer with a modem (my grandfather's being more of a terminal and only he used it) until probably 1996.
@@Craxin01 Home computers did not exist in 1974. The computer was an HP 2000 minicomputer the size of a small refrigerator located miles away. The school only had a Teletype KSR 33 and an acoustic coupler modem that was used to dial up and connect to the HP 2000.
So much nostalgia in this one! I used to own an ADM3a dumb terminal that was going to be dumped by the service org I worked for at the time, & got both it & the service manual, which included full schematics. It was a fascinating circuit that got by without a micro by using a state-machine implemented in plain vanilla TTL logic.
Yup. Just about as smart as you could get without a microprocessor. Sort of a baseline for "smart terminal" -- i.e., an adequate function set to run emacs!
This brings back memories. There is something aesthetically pleasing in a 'creative process' kind of way when working on a monochrome terminal. Its like a window to another world that hasn't yet formed. That was how I envisioned the future when I saw a terminal for the first time as a child. Thank you for reminding me of that feeling. Inspiring.
Back in Data Processing class, we had several Zenith terminals hooked to a main computer. You had to save your work frequently or you would use it. Someone figured out if you issued a command “CALL FRED” it would lock up all the terminals, and the main would have to be rebooted. You would hear someone scream when they realized they didn’t save their work! That was a mean trick 🤣
In the 70's, I was a tech on a mainframe. All tranisiters, descrete and core memory 5Kb x 12 bits. They ran 2 branch and 4 other banks with online terminals. Crts, thermal printers and k/b. Altogether about 100 or so terminals. The ones in the main bank were running at 1200 baud, but all the out of town ones ran 300 baud. Even so we had a heck of a time keeping the out of town ones running. In those days RS-232 was not 3 wires and forget-about-it. We had to use the full RS-232 complement. If the telephone co moved our line to different pair (which they did a lot) we had restrap the serial port pcb for all delays and there were a ton of them. That is something people don't appreciate nowdays, exactly how hard it was to keep a remote RS-232 line running. Takes me back a year or two. Enjoy you channel.
I spent a lot of time working on IBM's 3270-based terminals back in the 80s and early 90s for mainframe access (including the ones that did graphics). The font they used was very recognisable and has been replicated extremely well by the x3270 terminal emulator. The terminals themselves could not be operated on their own. You couldn't just plug them into the back of a computer and get them to go, they had to be connected via coax to a 3274/3174 control unit which was then either connected directly to the mainframe's bus via a rather chunky cable (this resulted in a "local" connection) or vla a comms link with a communications controller (this used serial, ethernet, or token-ring for a "remote" connection). I didn't know until relatively recently that the control unit handled a large chunk of the donkey work of managing the terminals. With something like a VT100, it's the terminal itself that handles holding a record of what is on the screen then working out how to put on the display, but with the 3270s it was the control unit that was managing the process. The physical terminals have long since been replaced with emulators running over TCP/IP.
And then IBM came up with the 5250-based terminals which was used for mini-computers like System/38, AS/400, and to this day, IBM i. My understanding is that the 5250 improved (but is not compatible with) 3270 technology. Both 5250 and 3270 protocols are very analogous to the early HTML web days in terms of function.
@@johnvriezen4696 I've not had the chance to use "i" or any of its predecessors although I have looked at getting hold of an old Power system to run it; turns out licensing is a bit expensive! The 3270 data stream is, on the outbound journey, more like VT100 or other protocols in that it is a set of orders saying where to put fields on the screen and what attributes they should have. This is all control codes and flag/data bytes, so not a markup system like HTML. Once the display is complete, there is no transmission back to the host system until a transmission action is taken (i.e. Enter, F1-24, PA1-3, Clear, Attn, lightpen, etc.). The control unit manages the user's interaction with the screen until an action is requested. The data stream the host receives will usually consist of the contents of any fields changed plus a record of the action taken.
My first experience with a roomful of terminals was at a call center in Dallas in the 90s. We just dumped data in, and it would autodial the next victim hehe. Every desk had a wyse terminal, a GTE rotary phone (you know the one) we still had to hold to our head, no headphones yet... and a big ashtray. The building inside was a dark yellow from the smoke. They kept the lights off to save power...it was sad.
Very instersting video as always, i really liked it, it would be cool if one day you talk about little terminals we had in the EU. For example in France we had the Minitel which was popular in the 80's and 90's, more popular than computers and they were useful to get information and order stuff online etc
The original Star Trek series DID have computers displaying graphics. For example, in the pilot "The Cage" the computer shows a graphical representation of the Talos System. In "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Kirk accesses the medical records of Elizabeth Dehner and Gary Mitchell which are displayed on a screen. They look like scanned copies of paper records, but I think we can assume they were meant to be something more advanced. In "What are Little Girls Made Of?" Spock brings up a graphic on the screen that shows information about planet Exo-III. The episode you showed had a display of Harry Mudd's arrest record on the screen. Other episodes show that the computers can record, store and playback photographs and video, something far beyond the capabilities of computers at the time. "Court Martial" has a playback of the Enterprise's computer log which IS prefaced with digital text that says "USS ENTERPRISE LOG. STAR DATE 2945.7" EDIT: And don't forget the bio beds with screens that displayed graphics of the patient's vital signs. You've been to the convention circuit, so you know there are big Trek fans who notice these things.
Funnily, it has been reported that many Apollo control room displays were actually TV links to paper printouts elsewhere in the building . I don't know if true or not . But I do know the terminal in the spaceship was even simpler, with just a few digits and a numeric keypad, yet it had many features of modern PCs .
Yes, I thought about these things. But I didn't feel they really counted. Like you said, it was more like a photograph that just happened to have some text in it. It wasn't actually computer generated text. Now, by the time you get to "The Motion Picture" then you see actual computer text and graphics being displayed.
@@The8BitGuy I always had the idea that they were pretending it was something else and you were expected to suspend your disbelief. Basically, they were trying to depict computers being able to do things that computers couldn't actually do at the time, but since computers couldn't actually do those things, they had to come up with cheap ways of faking it. For example, computers of the time did not have anything even approaching the storage capacity or processing power to store and display photographs and moving video or even audio for that matter. So they would have a transparent photograph in front of a backlight and pretend that they computer was displaying a photograph on a screen. The bio-beds in sickbay were actually backlight paper depicting the idea of a digital display showing the patient's vital signs. Even most of the "graphics" on the TNG computers that used the LCARS interface were actually backlit paper. The real difference between TOS and TMP is that TMP could use real computers with the actual capability instead of faking it.
@@The8BitGuy Regarding your remark about the spacecraft displays in 2001: A Space Odyssey, those displays were all fake computer displays that showed what the film makers thought computers would be able to do someday, and I think they were way ahead of their time. The graphics were all in fancy fonts, not basic courier-looking stuff, and the wireframe images of the AE-35 antenna looked very much like something from CAD/CAM software, even though they were actual physical models made from white-painted wires and filmed while rotating to achieve the look on the screen. Don't forget that they also showed flat panel displays long before such things were possible.
I don't know what year, I think late '70s, maybe early '80s ... but I saw an IMAGE on a VDT (as we called them back then; Video Display Terminals) ... and I literally stopped in my tracks, dumbstruck at the sight. All I'd seen for a decade was white on gray or green on black, or yellow on gray background ASCII characters.
@The8BitGuy I want to say thanks. Your channel was the first retro computing channel i stumbled across. I hadn't thought about my Atari 400 and very gray market Apple II in a couple decades. Your channel led me a lot of other awesome retro channels including the very awesome @UsagiElectric channel.
Fascinating. When I first watched Star Trek as a kid, I thought the sounds the computers made were supposed to represent the sound of hard drives working, a familiar sound which I grew up with. Never made the connection to mechanical teletypes.
KFWB (in the '70s an "all news, all the time" radio station) had the constant sound of teletypes in the background ... I'm sure that was supposed to represent the sound of a real "news room" back in the day.
I would definitely pay for a dedicated 8-Bit Guy channel *_for history_* , when you do these historical shows I think it really shows the best of what RUclips does. These are amazing, David always throws down bangers just like Anders! Entertaining, informative, nostalgic, and educational. But it's fun too :) Can't argue with that.
@@EtanMarlinI think emphasis on the word 'pay', as in, if it weren't free he'd be willing to pay for this quality content. Sounds like the whole premise of Patreon.
I worked for Visual Technology from 1980 until 1987 with a good portion of my time spent as a technician on their terminals and equipment. The company designed and manufactured Z-80 based terminals that emulated various models such as the DEC VT100 and DEC VT52. In the early 80s' the company acquired Ontel Corp. Ontel produced "intelligent" terminals which were more like personal computers. These 'terminals' had peripheral devices such as Hawk and Wren drives, floppy drives and other cards. Ontel was a big OEM manufacturer and created custom terminals used by Walgreens for their Inter-com RX system and became the sole supplier of terminals for Control Data Corp. While working on this equipment, I learned a ton about both analog and digital electronics which led me towards a career in electronics and later MIS and IT.
I remember staying up all night, and a friend of mine and I banged out a gif2tek4207 program to display graphics in some of our labs. Yeah, these were the labs that didn't have the Sun computers. Only vt100s, some v52s, and a handful of tek 4207s.
@@argonwheatbelly637 Those were fun times. There was so much going on with all the innovation taking place. Computers such as the Centurion and the "intelligent" terminals by Ontel were quite advanced for their day. The Ontel systems were actually PCs or workstations that came complete with hard drives including those huge Phoenix and Hawk drives. They were bundled with various option cards and peripherals such as world-mover-controllers and Diablo daisywheel printers. The word-mover-controllers were used for copy and paste functions just as we use CTRL+C and CTRL+V for that today. They came as a bundle for some kind of word-processing setup that was supposed to compete with Wang. It was working on equipment such as this that sparked my interest in computers and hardware. A couple of decades later, I was given some Sun SPARCs and they're still operational today. Visual made a series of graphics terminals that emulated the Tektronix line. Their V550, V102 with graphics board, and their V420C color terminals had the Tektronix 4400-series emulation built-in. The V420 also emulated the DEC graphics terminal and had dual Z80 CPUs with one dedicated to graphics processing. For vector graphics, they used the NEC7220D graphics processor. This chip handled the line-graphics and acceleration so that data could be drawn quickly on the screens.
I was just thinking about the difference of computers and terminals yesterday, what a miracle! Thanks for explaining this, and really good footage. Looking at all these machines working is breathtaking.
I had a couple Wyse terminals attached to my Linux machine before multiple PC monitors was a thing. Good times. Nice to see you made it to the ranch. The other David has cemented his place as one of the premier retro-computing personalities with his unique blend of content. Nice collab!
Honestly this channel always keeps getting better, and it never fails to amaze and entertain us. I never regretted subscribing to this channel the moment I saw the first video about how mice work and what they see. Awesome! ❤
The place I remember dumb terminals from most prominently (and fondly) growing up was in libraries that used them in addition to the old physical card catalogs. Especially if you were doing a term paper and needed to find out what articles were in periodicals about your topic. You'd look it up on the terminal, print the list of abstracts to the dot matrix line printer, then go through the list of brief abstracts or sometimes just titles and try to guess which ones were actually relevant to your term paper. Then you may have had to wait until your library borrowed the periodicals from another library to actually see and photocopy the articles. Does anyone know what kind of computer system in the library those dumb terminals would have been connected to?
7:14 "So, this is the rotating drum...there's 8k of memory in there..." I just realized that I'm going to get to see Usagi work on this fantastic enigma...thanks for sharing this amazing video!!!
Anyone who used VAXen knows all about them. My college had a lab of them hooked into an VAX 11/780. Many fought for time on the VT 220s, I was satisfied with the VT 105s. One classmate I remember had limited vision. The 80 and 132 line screens were invisible to her, but the college's attitude was "not our problem". I added a double width command to her login_com file, and the waterworks began. She could see everything and do her work.
Yep, back when I was a computer tech, we had 7 VAX 11/780 systems. In addition to the DEC VT terminals, I also used to dial in from home, initially with terminal software I wrote form my IMSAI 8080 and later with Procomm+ on an XT clone.
Thank you for this video! I was born in 1995 so I only briefly remember using a terminal at one or two libraries that still had them to look up where a book was. I remember really loving the green text and how instant it felt to look up information compared to at the time how slow cheap internet connections were back in the early 2000's.
Another great episode a history lesson and an better understanding how terminals work. I was thinking about the vacuum tube terminal, and I think a good cheat for character set would be upload it via paper tape into whatever memory it contains, or a boot loader on the computer that would upload it to the terminal.
Thanks so much for swinging out to the ranch, I had a blast hanging out!
1h ago this video just got released one minute ago
Now you’re good!
@@helloimacat000it's because of patreon
@@helloimacat000 2 hours ago in 5 minutes now
😊agreed
I think it's worth mentioning that in France they had Minitel, a system run by the Postal Office that put a terminal in every household in the early 80s. What started as a way to save money by having the phonebook in a computer instead of printing millions of copies each year ended up becoming a proto-internet of sorts, with people sending emails and doing online shopping. It even had the same problems as the internet but 2 decades early, like a start-up bubble and controversy about pornography to minors
You can even access the serial port on some models, so it's still usable as a terminal for a linux PC, although with that keyboard, not a very good one x)
Funny that they were trying to do away with phonebooks all the way back then yet still in 2023 I receive a phonebook in the mail once a year. It just seems like such a waste to still do that. I'd guess around 99 percent of people who get them throw them straight in the trash or put them on a shelf where they will sit never to be used. As much as I like things from the past there is no reason to have phonebooks anymore. First of all the white pages are listings of people who still have standard land-line phones which is hardly anyone nowadays. And as for the yellow pages I can find the number of any business I want in a matter of seconds on google. I used to say they should still make them but only for people who call and specify that they want one. Nowadays though I think they should just stop making them entirely. How many people is the phonebook actually useful for? Even old people have cellphones now.
That’s kinda neat tho
@@kaktusgoreng What's interesting is that it was so successful that it actually slowed down the adoption of the Internet in France. These terminals were free and access was affordable (same price per minute as your average telephone call), so millions of households had one. They were also designed to basically last forever, since the technology was stagnant. When the Internet came along in the '90s, you had to buy an expensive PC for it (that would be outdated in a few years) and to many, it just didn't seem worth the hassle, given that all of the online services they were using were available anyway. Since Minitel allowed private firms to offer services for it however, these companies had no trouble transitioning to the Internet once it came along, given that they already had experience with online services.
Early internet and early forerunners fascinate me a lot.
I can recall as a small child, my mom coming home from work (at Sears) telling us that they were going to formally train her to "run the teletype machine". She was excited for it because it also came along with a small pay bump. 🙂
That must have been a very cute moment of personal history.
Wish I could magically go back to that time and have my healthy 12 year old body again. I'd have more fun with it all this time around.
Thanks for not assuming that everyone who watches your channel knows all this, but yet showing the information in a fun and interesting way! Always a joy to watch your content and your genuine passion for all things tech.
+1 I would be easily fooled by terminal and telling me it was a computer. Now I know! (:
@@alphaforce6998then he looks female enough to me...
RIGHT LIKE some time your dumb .. Now though Your terminal
Wait.. Let me scroll back up I think I said that Wrong
The video called “The Mother of All Demos” from 1968 is a phenomenal video for vintage computer enthusiasts to watch. It demonstrated a video terminal to a live audience of 2,000 people, with the ability to edit text.
The Mother of All Demos is the first demonstration of a computer mouse and of a graphical user interface (GUI).
That technology was licensed to XEROX who used it to develop the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star.
Xerox licensed the technology to Apple and they used it in the Mac.
@@wmtrader No technology was "licensed", by either party, as GUI concepts was not considered patentable at the time. Apple stole most of the design for the Lisa/Macintosh GUI, including the central desktop metaphor, without any kind of authorisation, from the Xerox Star well after their visit to Xerox Parc to see the Alto.
@@wmtrader Xerox corporate didn't really know what to do with it because is was not a copier.
@@amazing7633 They did a fully working operating system and word processor with it. But the machine was too expensive at the time to reach a big market, so commercial success for such systems needed to wait a few more years for chips to become more affordable.
@@amazing7633 actually, they knew it very well. They marketed professional workstations for desktop publishing that did things that Macs would do 10 years later. The problem is that these were expensive products that targeted big companies. They were looking for a personal computer manufacturer with an established brand that could market a cheaper version to individuals. That's where Jobs stepped in and did a tremendous job in creating a stripped down and more user friendly version of their OS that could run on cheaper machines. But Xerox was actually well aware of what they had created and of the fact that it would be the future. They were so confident in their technology that they allowed Apple to pay them with future shares emissions, as Apple didn't have enough cash. Bottom line: they perfectly knew what they had created and what to do with it.
As a sysadmin, I still use terminals; not only during regular operations with virtual terminals, but when a system is seemingly unresponsive, the hosting provider can provide a serial connection to the faulty server and this gets piped as-is into a terminal emulator through internet. Same for virtual machines; we can setup a virtual serial port for the guest system, and literally pipe that from the host to get a working shell from the kernel even though SSH and sometimes virtual display are broken.
It's very useful, as it's very basic and does not requires much working parts.
Kinda makes me wanna try to plug one of those type writers into the console port
I'm guessing it's safe to assume that DOSBox can do that, too.
@@Chaos89P What is Dos Box ??
@@josephgaviota An Emulator for DOS, mostly focused on game compatibility, but could in theory run other DOS software.
@@flametitan100 It can even run operating environments like Windows 3, although that might be for the Windows Entertainment Pack to run correctly. I've also used it to run Word 5.5 for DOS.
There were also X-Terminals (e.g the NCD19 from 1989) that acted just like dumb terminals but displayed graphics from Unix servers via the X11 protocol.
Elon Musk would have loved those.
@@Tiago-Martins Why do elon simps never make any sense
@@heliusuniverse7460 Woosh, you missed the obvious sarcasm.
@@heliusuniverse7460 the presence of so many X's is the key to understand what he means
The X logo looks a lot like the X11 logo.
Hi 8 Bit Guy,
I'm old and used dumb terminals at Texas Instruments but it's been so very long that I learned stuff too from your great video. Thank you so much. I feel very privileged that my life went from punch cards to cloud. It was an incredible journey.
I still technically use a terminal to this day. Instead of a dedicated, single use device, we have thin client computers running an IBM 5250 terminal program to connect to an IBM Power7 which is essentially a modern IBM AS/400. Works for us since our software was all written in the 1980's in COBOL and we still use it today, have even integrated it into the modern web. Terminals aren't dead, they are just taking a different form!
Many people would quibble about calling a thin client a terminal, but of course that somewhat ignores the transition-period “smart terminals” with extremely limited local computation. You’re 100% correct that they’re the same spirit!
Terminals haven't died, for sure, they've evolved, and may continue to do so.
Yeah we got several modern mainframes that necessitate the use of terminal clients as well.
Alot of healthcare and insurance companies still use the AS/400 or equivalent, my job right now in healthcare uses it mainly for time keeping (KRONOS) , but whenever we had to reset passwords for managers, we would have to use a terminal emulator.
Although i did use real terminals back in the early 2000s as a furniture manufacturer as they did all data entry into an actual AS/400 midrange, we had a bunch of 3178/3179/and 3180 terminals. along with PCs using your standard software terminals and a few PC's that were not on the network using a hardware terminal emulator (connects to the twinax connection that the dumb terminals would use)
Healthcare or banking? Only two industries I can think of that this but my guess is banking since the code is COBOL. Always thought if the some of the tools I use today to help code had really caught on when COBOL was common it would still be useful for a lot of systems. Graphics not so much but really how much low level graphics does anyone actually write even today?
The NASA mission control screens aren't really terminals but basically TVs; They received a video signal that was a live from a video camera that combined computer output and pre-rendered outputs
That was the case for the big, "wall type" screens, those were part video projection and part computer output.
But the terminals seen at each mission control desk were something different, those were called "charactrons", video tubes which could display a fixed set of characters or even graphics. Each of these tubes were used with hardwired logic, that can change the display to a certain degree, obviously to display varying values, but also switching "pages" for different displays. But their function was pretty much "baked in", for whatever telemetry was needed for the controller, so you couldn't just, for example use the CAPCOM displays for FIDO...
@@soriac2357 thanks for the explanation. I was thinking I remembered something like that from an old video of Fran, but I really thought it described the Crt screens. Cool to know the details now.
In the video they where not saying NASA was using terminals. But that the concept of having computer screens was kinda advanced at that time. He was giving an example of where tech was ahead of science fiction to some extent.
@@soriac2357 The wall type were Eidophor projectors. They used oil and a rotating disk.
Wow! Brings back memories of early Silicon Valley when there were still fruit trees between the little office buildings. I worked at Tymeshare between '74-'77. thermal paper and teletypes. Later, wrote a lot of COBOL on dumb terminals. Blue/green bar paper. Mountains of it. The stone age. Thanks so much for this.
I worked security in Silicon Valley in the late 70s. Tymeshare was one of my patrol stops. Later on, I worked at the old Pacific Telephone, then Pacific Bell, and became the go-to guy in my office to pull COBOL-based reports on those dumb terminals printed out on bar paper. Good times. 😁
@@PlasmaCoolantLeak Yeah it was great and a lot of fun. And there's still people writing COBOL out there!
Before ethernet, each of these terminals were linked by a dedicated serial/parallel cable to the main computer. That's why those suspended floors were needed for
Ethernet is named after the AETHER, which is a more accurate understanding of the nature of this realm than the present "space-time" hoax they've been pushing. Some of the best advances in technology were made when people just knew that there is an invisible substance of unknown specifics that fills what we perceive as empty space...and even today, because it is not openly discussed, advances have been made that benefit a few.
I dare to say, relatively thin serial cables and network cables can go in trays above the inner ceiling, but raised floor enable piping for the cooling system for the cooling as well as heavy power cables to be routed out of sight and away from stumbling feet...
And remember that IBM Mainframe (and other IBM compatible systems) used Bus and Tag cables to connect the disk and terminal controllers to the main CPU complex, These were thick and heavy cables that you wouldn't run overhead if you could avoid it.
The sort-of rule of thumb was that if it was a data processing or computer machine room, the cables would go down under a raised floor (which also hid not just pipes for water-cooled systems, but also air ducts for air cooled systems), and if it was a telecommunication machine room (like a telephone exchange), the cables would go up to trays suspended from the roof, and the floor would be solid concrete (mechanical switching gear was heavy!).
This has tended to break down over the last couple of decades, and now many computer rooms use overhead cables. This is mainly due to not needing individual cables per terminal (just network cables), and also the fact that often comms equipment like network and SAN switches are installed in the racks with the computers (so a lot of the cables are just restricted to inside individual racks), just needing trunks links between the racks. Also fibre-optic cables are often used, which are much lighter, and have much higher data bandwidth than older types of cables.
So true! My fist job was as a "Field Engineer" with Burroughs, installing miles of cables under the raised flooring. All kinds of cables down there, but the largest quantities were the hundreds of serial cables (full 25-conductor RS232 cables!) , running from the DTE boxes (don't recall the name, but each one could handle 32 lines, or later 64 lines) out to the racks of modems. And also the huge cables for interconnecting the mainframes to the printers, card readers, SPOs, and banks of disk packs, tape drives, and HPT disks. Those were the days! A favorite prank with those cables among the older field engineers was to send the newbie out the engineering storage area, for a "cable stretcher", when the cables weren't quite able to reach their destination... Yup, we sure did have a LOT of cables down there. An nothing at all "overhead", as some have suggested. The ceiling area in those data center machine rooms was all HVAC and fire suppression stuff. No cabling related to the mainframes.
I love the layers of abstraction: a modern, graphical interface emulates a text-mode window that emulates a dumb terminal that emulates a teletype.
EDIT: of course the whole thing probably runs in a virtual machine with virtual memory. Not sure when reality gets involved!
Termception
Kinda OOT: There’s a program called CRT (cool retro term) that was designed to emulate the look of the crt monitors of those said dumb terminals
I always find amazing to see some formats or commands that we are still using today in different OSs, like "DIR" or "-RW-RW-R--"
I'd like to watch a video about the evolution of the basic commands like "CD", "DIR", "MKDIR", "RMDIR", "PING", etc...
its emulators all the way down!
I depends on whether or not we are actually living in a simulation!
What simply made it hard to use screens for text for a while was lack of good internal memory for the screens. NASA actually used physical overlays for most of the text and a display for numbers, this was recorded by a camera and multiplexed (read: made into TV channels) onto the displays in mission control
That and the screen flickering (in movies and TV shows). In every movie where they actually used computer screens you can see the bad effects that different framerates have.
@@neumi569 Since all movies uses 24 fps, those computer screens doesn't display very well on cameras that record in 24 fps.
lol, i like the idea of using overlays because we did not have enough memory.
@@leap123_
24FPS has not necessarily been the standard since digital projection became ubiquitous. There are so many caveats and a lot of nuance, but it is film projection which actually was standardised at 24fps. Cameras had long since already had variable control over frame rate, and filmmakers commonly utilised that for artistic and practical purposes. An experienced camera operator could try to match the frame rate on the screen, but mechanical vs electrical limitations can and most probably will still end up being off.
Early terminals often had to use delay line or shift-register memory, making them quite complicated. During most of the screen, you could only access the specific character being displayed, and that required lots of tricky timing to update the display. The time period where directly addressable memory became affordable, but a dedicated CPU was not yet affordable was rather narrow, and ended in the late '70s.
A lot of the older teletypes shown in the first part of the video (Model 15, 28KSR, and even 28ASR) were rebuilt in the late '60s and early '70s to be used with acoustic modems so deaf people could 'call' each other on the phone. I don't know if it still holds true anymore, but as late as the 1990s, there were some older deaf people in my area that had one lurking in a forgotten corner of their basement or garage...
Thanks for calling the 13th Floor BBS! (Although it could hardly be considered "calling" these days considering it's not dial-up anymore, I suppose.) [13:22]
I saw that and was like I CALL THERE!! I saw the phone phreaking episode but would love to see some coverage of the pre 1990 BBS scene, commodore especially.
yasss a BBS only episode would be so awesome. I've seen others do it but it needs to be done in T8BG fashion :D
@@JTDoyle-qj4oz I'd like to see that as well. It was a huge community and oddly enough just about everyone who was involved in it turned out to work in IT in some form or fashion.
Nice to see we got our own little fan club here. The pre-internet was awesome before average Joe got ahold of it.
Terminal interfacing is still very much alive and relevant in modern IT. I’ve been a network engineer for ~27 years now. The vast majority of the equipment I work with every day still supports a physical serial connection to a terminal. Obviously this is almost always a terminal emulator these days, but a ‘dumb’ serial terminal would still work. When everything is at-least partially working properly, we can forego the serial connection and use IP (usually SSH) to emulate the serial connection over a network connection. But we always keep a serial connection handy for when lower level access is needed.
Indeed. I've connected up and used serial interfaces on things like routers and IP cameras and other devices without network shell access, to rescue or gain access to the OS (often to enable ssh, telnet, ftp, tftp, etc.) Sometimes a serial connector header would have to be soldered in place first into the unpopulated points on the motherboard.
It's amazing just how many devices are just mini/embedded Linux machines, much less powerful than a Raspberry PI yet still doing their things.
Edit: typo
This was my day today. Two QFX switches, one EX switch, two PAN 3400 series. All initially configured by a serial console.
@@nickwallette6201Even Cisco routers and network switches are configured in this manner.
The devices you are talking about are Juniper network switches and Palo Alto Networks firewalls.
@@szr8Those essentially are JTAG interfaces.
Also, their are console servers...
I remember my dad’s office at the Bethlehem Steel Corporate site and him calling down to the “computer”room to retrieve sales figures for his terminal. He’d do the work on a separate calculator and put the entries back into the terminal. When I was there before and after school, he’d give me a piece a paper and tell me to go to the computer room and find certain data tapes. At 7-12 years old, I learned how to spool those data tapes (under supervision, of course).
Great nostalgic topic for me. As a home health nurse in the 1990s we had dummy terminals at our agency that were connected to a AS 400 IBM computer located in the hospital. We were sternly warned always to log off the terminals every time we used them for if the units were shutdown by flipping the power switch or if the power went out the whole system likely would crash. I was amazed at how well the whole system of 30 terminals worked. The terminals were spread out across town, connected by dedicated phone lines. We used the system for ordering supplies, basic word processing, for entering forms to be transferred to the US government for reimbursement. However, in those early days I accidentally typed in a global record delete that began to rapidly erase every patient in succession from “A” to “Z”. I could see the names flashing by on the terminal so I flipped the power switch which surprisingly interrupted the loop. Three temporary secretaries were hired to re type about 280 records up to the letter “R” which took several days to enter. I kept silent about my mistake!
That's really a program error, not yours. Impractical.
The first terminals I saw were in 1972 at the office where I registered for college. They had a whole room full of people using them. It seemed very futuristic. But as students we had to use teletypes and card readers...
terminal emulators even began to emulate physical terminals themselves for added compatibility. You can also still use TTY to this day, in fact Linux pretty much only supports TTY and everything is rendered on top a session of it
Yes, Unix (Linux) is stone age. That's what I've been saying since the early 1980s :D
TTY? That distinctive tonal beeping and clacking of a keyboard are coming back to me.
@@herrbonk3635 stones work best still I guess
@@herrbonk3635 _Unix (Linux) is stone age._
And yet, 93% of the world's adult population has a unix device in their front pocket.
I mean, most distros have TTY devices inside their /dev folder!
To riff on the end bit, the "terminal" software available in Linux and Mac has much more than a skin deep connection to this history. Its operating system architectures date from the period of true dumb terminals, with files like /dev/tty (standing for "teletype") to manage connections to user sessions, and it still supports the same escape sequences of characters that were used back in the day to move the cursor, change colors, etc. If you have one of these devices, you can most likely connect it to a modern Linux system (possibly with some work to enable insecure legacy stuff) and use it to log in and run programs just like 40+ years ago.
Yeah, I remember setting up a machine with the serial port added to inittab and a null modem cable to a machine which I could run a terminal on . This was probably my most secure machine at the time, stripped down to run only the essentials ,
Indeed! This is a core component of why we can use computers without features like keyboards and displays, now known as "headless". One obscure bit of compatibility is for upper case only terminals like the one in Apple 1; logging in with an all upper case username tells getty to switch on case translation modes, as with "stty olcuc iuclc". Otherwise you couldn't type most Unix commands, as they are lower case.
It's trivial to enable, and not insecure! You get a login: prompt just like you do on a virtual console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn, where you can choose F1 through F7. 7 virtual consoles are the default, and your graphical session (and graphical login screen, in some configurations) will use one. For all the others, you'll just see the virtual console number, hostname, and a friendly login prompt!
That takes me back, the first computer I used was a Cromemco System 3, with an ADM3. Thinking about VDUs in the valve era, they probably could have used storage CRTs, like RADAR, and vector graphics, which would be less demanding on the storage, it would have been a lot like drum or mercury delay line memory.
I think there were a few vector terminals, but they would obviously require a very different format for the serial input.
@@charliekahn4205 Interesting, I would have imagined memory mapped in some way
Happy to see Datapoint mentioned. I'd love to see an entire video about them. I feel they deserve to be better remembered considering the amount of new ideas they brought into computing.
I worked for a few years with Datapoint computers. The company had three at different sites (one in Norway) that were, for the time, advanced small stand-alone computers that could connect up by modem when required and transmit files to and from another stand-alone machine in the main office, which wrote it to mag tape which was read by the mainframe.
Sounds pretty silly today, but it worked and I guess was worth it. I certainly enjoyed it.
In the early '80's if you dialed Merrill Lynch's 800 number it would be answered by someone with a Datapoint terminal. The terminal included a telephone handset.
Kind of cool topic as Don Lancaster - the creator of the ‘TV typewriter’ in 1973 and the famous TTL Cookbook author- passed away just recently.
Sorry to hear that. I have some of his books and used to read his columns, in Popular Electronics, IIRC.
The technological pace of the 1960s was absolute madness.
Scientific funding & liberal drug use are a hell of a combination 😂❤
@@Secret_Takodachitrue
Fun fact, the Bendix G-15 was designed by Harry Huskey. He had previously worked on the ACE and SWAC computers with none other than Alan Turing.
I worked for Data-100 and supported the printers and card punches and card readers at Bendix Guidance, Bendix Flight and Bendix Aviation in Teterboro, NJ. This terminal equipment was connected to a mainframe in Southfield, MI. Teterboro was known as Bendix Borough for six years.'37 to '43.
I was upgraded from a VT220 to a VT330 when I worked at Digital in the late 1980s. The DEC Rainbow and Digital DECmate II and III also had great terminal emulators in them. They allowed me to take a VT100 home back then so I could dial in at night if I needed to. It was pretty nifty.
My first job out of college was as a system manager for VAX/VMS mini computers. We had some DECWriter (teletypes) but also many VT220s. VMS was (and is) a great operating system!
Data displays were made in the 50’s and 60’s for military applications. Look up a Charachtertron. There was no digital pixel set to create as they used a physical mask to create the characters and they could write a whole screen of text with it. The founder of a company I used to do work for designed and built the first ones for the Convair corporation in the 50’s I believe. Later there was a typotron tube but it worked on a slightly different principal.
Minor nerd quibble (the best kind in Star Trek); the computer occasionally shows text in the conference room when they look at people’s files, such as Harry Mudd or Kodos the Executioner’s criminal records.
They also showed text on the bridge a couple times on those larger monitors near the ceilings. Such as Roger Korby or Gary Mitchell’s files.
The wider point about the bridge, engineering etc almost entirely having graphs and status lights rather than text still stands though ;)
Just about any monitor on the Enterprise was multi modal, and could display text, graphics, and full motion video, with sound, anything the episode writers wanted. Although, it was actually done through a bit of film magic called the overlay.
Even having graphs was a big step up since most TV shows and movies always showed spinning reels, blinking lights and beep boop noises. lol
@@dougbrowning82 they were definitely thinking ahead of the times with it! Even though all the bridge monitors could probably in-universe show anything, I wanted to be ultra-specific about where they usually did the overlay in post. I guess I could’ve mentioned the map of the Romulan Neutral Zone on the viewscreen!
I always assumed the colorful pictures of nebulae and planets on the bridge in TOS to be actual monitors, that were only presented by the set designers as still pictures due to studio budget and available technology at that time. I guess, using a complicated projection system to emulate such a futuristic device for simple background usage was way above their time and money budget. One Episode costed already $190,000 (~$1.4 million in today's money).
Yeah... and there was a couple episodes where there was a bunch of data and the computer would print it out and it made no noise as I recall. I grew up around weird old government/science computers in the 70's and 80's and that sound of the computer is definitely not a teletype printer. To me that is the sound of core memory when those old computers were running programs. Be it I was a little kid around those machines but that is what I remember and have always associated it with.
I doubt anyone has any core memory systems that still work today so it's impossible to test if my ancient childhood memory is correct.
I remember the computer card catalog at the libraries growing up. You would "use the terminal" to find the books. It took me later in life to realize how it worked, that there was a mainframe somewhere that the terminals were all hooked up to. I just now remembered using my computer at home to dial into the library, and using the terminal just like using it at the library. Wow, tech sure has progressed.
Yep. I remember there still being some around at some of the branches of our county library system even in the early 2000s. They tied into the same system that the GUI-based Windows apps and, later, Web-based interfaces used. Especially when they were built directly into the architecture; it would be quite some time before you could cram a Windows PC into the same tight space.
Oh, and the bookmobile used a terminal connected to a radio antenna to handle checking stuff in and out. I remember that they sometimes had to unpark and repark a few times to establish a solid connection that wasn't blocked by the trees and weather.
Our library in Winnipeg used Dynix Door for its first online catalogue and reservation system. you could even telnet into it from home.
Many of these terminals had CPUs, ROM, and RAM similar to home computers of the era. The VT240 (a fairly common terminal in it's day) had a 7.5MHz DEC T-11 CPU, the same CPU Atari used in their arcade cabinets! It's like how the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had a 1MHz 6502 CPU that was every bit as powerful as the Commdore 64 it was connected to.
This is fascinating stuff, David! I had never stopped to think about no text on screens in older shows and movies! This simply wasn’t a concept in people’s minds then as you said, but we can’t imagine a world without it now.
It is, I love this stuff :)
Even though I lived through this era (I’m 60) I never noticed that text on terminals started. It just seemed natural at the time.
Maybe it’s because us software people saw it as going from punch cards to terminals and had seen the NASA stuff. The programmers of the 60’s & 70’s were so happy to ditch the cards and teletype style stuff they didn’t spend time thinking about what was really a huge evolutionary event in computing.
Edit to say I’m not old enough to programmed professionally in 70’s was just in awe of the elders at work. I knew a guy that started working as a payroll programmer on an IBM System 3. His employer bought the computer and software. He got the job of figuring out how to make it work because his degree was in mathematics and he had just started working in accounting
@@Jen39x I learned to program on punched cards (ForTran), but my first jobs in the field were in the 80s. I learned 6502 on an Atari 800, and they needed Apple II tools. That was my foot in the door to a career. On to the 8088 PC after that. ASM for that CPU was cake after the 6502.
I think of the 70s movie colossus the forbin project, which did use text on screens. but I did not think much past that
In the 1950s Charactron CRTs were used to display text. Vector displays could also display text.
Nicely crafted episode. Initially I was like "Meh, I know what a terminal is", but you still managed to make it interesting and have a nice run through history with a good pacing.
Great video explaining terminals, really great to see both you guys in a collaboration video.
I get so excited when David posts. Thanks for the videos!
Very interesting history. It's nice to see how things evolve and even after all these years, there's still a remenant of terminal
I work in a field where our users still operate terminal sessions, even though they may not know exactly what they are! Can't wait to use this video to give our folks a little background on why the "old tech" we operate has been so useful for so long!
Interesting. I wouldn't think a farmer would have much use for such things.
Nobody cares
@@danx9194 Cared enough to comment
@@danx9194 Nobody cares that you think that nobody cares.
@@HerecomestheCalavera and nobody cares that you think nobody cares that i think nobody cares
Interesting history lesson on how we got from teletypes to terminals. One thing to keep in mind is that PCs still run as terminals to this day, just smarter...not just the command line interface that you showed, but any time we talk to another machine over the internet, it's still basically the same thing. It's just that the protocol has become more sophisticated and more complex than 'just' the old ANSI codes. And then someone figured out how to send actual runnable pieces of code over the connection to be run locally instead of on the remote system.
I remember replacing this things with thin clients during vocational training (right before i went of to study information technology)…wow, this brings back memories 😁👍
I used one in the dorm commons at the U of Wyoming in 1990. Set up an account on the VAX to run a statistical analysis package for a polisci class. Got my output on paper in a basket labeled with the first initial of my last name at the now-demolished Ivinson Building, where all that was located.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but that account also gave me email and internet access (such as it was back then).
Sounds very much like my experience at the University of Iowa starting in 1992. The dorm computer labs had a mixture of terminals and computers. I did get the email account and learned how to telnet to servers like ISCA BBS and Usenet before there was much you could do on the WWW. I was happy to use the terminals if the computers were taken since it was all text-based anyway. I got an account on all the computer servers they offered, even though I didn't know anything about mainframe systems. I taught myself how to use Unix from the man pages. I never got much into the Vax system - it was too unlike DOS for me to figure out. I even convinced my parents to get a dialup Compuserve account so I could email them, which we did so regularly.
My first experience with a "real" computer was my freshman year in college, where I was a CS major (back then, you were really a Math major with a certain specialty). It was used in my FORTRAN programming class and consisted of several DEC VT100 terminals connected to a DEC PDP 11 "minicomputer." Loved those DEC VT-series terminals. _Great_ keyboards on them.
Yeah!!
It is wild how back then you really needed to know what you were doing to be able to use a computer. Technology moved so fast back then. You might go to college and learn all about how to use computers and in just a few years time all the information would be outdated. I'd say it wasn't until Windows 9x that your average person could use a computer without too much trouble. Windows 3.1 was a big step ahead but you still had to have a little knowledge of the system to really be able to use it. Once Windows XP came out then anyone and their grandma could use the computer pretty easily. It has been almost 22 years since XP came out and things really haven't changed that much compared to how it was back in the 80s and 90s.
10:48 - That's a great explanation. Reminds me of MIDI use with keyboards. I can set up a MIDI controller to a synth and use that to play (control) the synth, but on its own, the MIDI controller does absolutely nothing. The lights may be all on, but without a synth to echo data (music) through my monitors, the MIDI controller can be thought of as a dumb terminal.
At its core, a MIDI instrument is basically a serial output and a bunch of buttons. So it's like a terminal with a broken screen.
this was one of the most interesting videos you have made to day imo
I'll be aging myself here. I went to high school in Utah and we were fortunate enough to have a two year program for computer science and programming. The majority of the systems we used were the still fairly new Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 computers. We had one Commodore Pet as well which nobody used (I wish I had that now). In one corner of the room was a teletype machine. This connected to the Univac mainframe at the University of Utah and one could program in Basic, Cobol, and I think Fortran. Obviously it wasn't the most popular system to use, but I did do a few assignments on it just to try it out. Anyone with an account on the mainframe also had an e-mail address assigned. I never got an e-mail, though I wish I had because that mainframe was one of the original Arpanet nodes. So in theory, I could have gotten an actual e-mail Form a system in another state before there was an 'internet'.
I remember using VT320 at my University. They were connected to a DEC VAX 8500 and runs VMS. Also we used Prime Terminals and Volker Craig terminal connected to a Prime computer.
Excellent material, as always!
Thanks David! So much more than I expected when I first started watching!
Wonderful episode, David. I love your history episodes, even those, like this one, that cover stuff many of us nerds already know quite a bit about. My first few jobs had me working at a VT100 or VT220 terminal extensively and I loved the amber text on a black screen. Good times. Today I keep a look out for old WYSE terminals to use with my 6502-based projects. Thank you for a wonderful stroll down terminal lane.
What is interesting is those modern terminal apps you see in modern OS behave exactly like an old teletype, like in the sense that when you see what you type is the program echoing back the characters.
Amazing how terminals used to be big expensive machines that tons of places used. Now all that can be done in a small program included with the OS and hardly anyone uses it or even knows what it is for nowadays.
You can still run minicom on Linux, through a serial port to another Linux system to get that old time UNIX feel. I have an old ThinkPad with a 4:3 display that I've done that with. 🙂
Its crazy seeing how far you have come since I first discovered you in the ibook g4 review days!
I have always been fascinated by terminals and mainframes. It's such an interesting concept that we still have these days with exchange servers and all manners of communication and file sharing systems for inter-office use when that was exactly what mainframes did most places. To think back in those days it was a lot simpler to setup when nowadays to achieve that you have to maintain a massive software stack.
The cloud is really the mainframe re-invented.
Being in Europe, I appreciate that so many cool things in the U.S. happens outside urban areas.
From what general part of our lovely continent are you?
If you don't mind me asking as a fellow European continent inhabitant😎
HA! who gave you that idea
@@CanoTheVolcano me or op
We do have a countryside in Europe to. But very few people seam to be aware of it.
@@matsv201 Maybe north of Sundsvall. Europe's countryside is nothing like the countryside in the Americas.
My first IT job was looking after one of the first Mainframe and Terminal setups. the Honeywell DPS6. Often used in Government "establishments" as was the one i looked after. With over 3000 terminals all on 10mb Fibre. This was in 1987, Ours was used to connect to a database and it was actually amazingly fast. Any searches that were input were responded to in just seconds.
Same ere, out original set up was via 2400 modem , the server was about 60 miles away
Later we used cluster controllers holding up to 24 terminals per cluster and each cluster has 9600 modem 4 - wire or full duplex private line ( not dial up )
Screen response was very good, i dont recall any screen enquires taking more than 3 to 5 seconds for a update, the system would have had minimum 80 users per site , so about 1600 users on the host server
Even a full screen of 80x24 is about 2k - that does not take long to transfer even at 2400.
Take into account the escape sequence that will clear the screen, and the internal memory would through up the blank enquiry form, then populate the field with a home command / data 1 / tab / data 2 / tab data 3 etc
10 megabit fiber? Wow! I bet that was insane back in 1987. Up until 2022 my internet speed was only 3mbps! I realize your 10mbps connection was just the internal network but still that seems like insane speed for 87.
@@HerecomestheCalavera I am not sure when fibre was available, i known in my senario we serial / copper wiring until co-axial was introduced from 1985 to 1992, then some larger buildings internal wiring went to fiber optic.
By that time, all internal became cat 5 as novell was phased out and ethernet was adopted - we did have fiber connecting adjoining buildings together
@@HerecomestheCalavera UK Defence network, budget was unlimited back then.
Always awesome content from you!
@The 8-Bit Guy I've watched your channel for years now, and this is by far the BEST video you've ever done...I gotta say. I know, I'm biased, but still...excellent video!!!
I remember working on VT-320 terminals tied to VAX clusters at a DuPont plant.
At the same time, we had a large IBM 3090 mainframe on site which included an assortment of terminals, including several 3270s which weighed a ton!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I remember using a terminal back when I worked at Pizza Hut. This particular store in 2003 consisted of a windows 95 machine for a server that had nine terminals connected. Not all of them had keyboards but instead had six button pads on the line to control the orders that were on screen. As you can imagine if that silly 95 machine went down the whole store would grind to a halt until it rebooted. Ironically enough I noticed recently that some of that software from back then is still in use. I believe it is only used as timekeeping but still was odd to see it.
Well, that's yesterday to an old dude like me. So called terminals had been more or less "stone age" for a quarter of a century in 2003 as well.
Always glad to see you a video from you
Love what y'all do on this channel! Howdy from East Texas.
My grandfather used to run the records department for the local university and did a lot of data entry. At first, it was punch cards. In fact, they still used them on occasion up into the 80s. I remember him sitting me in front of a terminal with a green monochrome screen and showed me a dog chasing a cat. He typed the word dog then cat and then scrolled back to the beginning of the word dog and held down the space bar. We even had a modem in the house, the old kind you had to put the phone handle onto, so he could deal with issues at work without driving several miles back to the office.
That's an acoustic coupler modem.
@@RaymondHng Hmm, not sure I ever heard the name before. I'm 44 now and that was when I was like 8, so even if I had heard it then, I wouldn't remember. Thanks.
@@Craxin01 I’ve been using computers since 1974. Anderson Jacobson was a manufacturer of those modems where the telephone handset is seated inside two rubber cups. Those are acoustic couplers. Two models were the AJ 311 and AM 211.
@@RaymondHng Wow! 1974? My mom was 16 then, hadn't even met my dad then. My earliest computer experience was an Apple IIe followed by a TRS-80. Didn't have a computer with a modem (my grandfather's being more of a terminal and only he used it) until probably 1996.
@@Craxin01 Home computers did not exist in 1974. The computer was an HP 2000 minicomputer the size of a small refrigerator located miles away. The school only had a Teletype KSR 33 and an acoustic coupler modem that was used to dial up and connect to the HP 2000.
Always great to see 2 of my favorite RUclipsrs collaborating in the same video. Great subject as well, caters to the strengths of both of you.
So much nostalgia in this one! I used to own an ADM3a dumb terminal that was going to be dumped by the service org I worked for at the time, & got both it & the service manual, which included full schematics. It was a fascinating circuit that got by without a micro by using a state-machine implemented in plain vanilla TTL logic.
Yup. Just about as smart as you could get without a microprocessor. Sort of a baseline for "smart terminal" -- i.e., an adequate function set to run emacs!
Thanks for the great video. As a regular viewer of yours i actually didn’t know most of this so very interesting to me :)
7:07 Geranium diode! did I hear that right? 😄
Of course, everyone knows diodes don't grow on trees 😋
This brings back memories. There is something aesthetically pleasing in a 'creative process' kind of way when working on a monochrome terminal. Its like a window to another world that hasn't yet formed. That was how I envisioned the future when I saw a terminal for the first time as a child. Thank you for reminding me of that feeling. Inspiring.
Back in Data Processing class, we had several Zenith terminals hooked to a main computer. You had to save your work frequently or you would use it. Someone figured out if you issued a command “CALL FRED” it would lock up all the terminals, and the main would have to be rebooted. You would hear someone scream when they realized they didn’t save their work! That was a mean trick 🤣
In the 70's, I was a tech on a mainframe. All tranisiters, descrete and core memory 5Kb x 12 bits. They ran 2 branch and 4 other banks with online terminals. Crts, thermal printers and k/b. Altogether about 100 or so terminals. The ones in the main bank were running at 1200 baud, but all the out of town ones ran 300 baud. Even so we had a heck of a time keeping the out of town ones running. In those days RS-232 was not 3 wires and forget-about-it. We had to use the full RS-232 complement. If the telephone co moved our line to different pair (which they did a lot) we had restrap the serial port pcb for all delays and there were a ton of them. That is something people don't appreciate nowdays, exactly how hard it was to keep a remote RS-232 line running.
Takes me back a year or two.
Enjoy you channel.
I spent a lot of time working on IBM's 3270-based terminals back in the 80s and early 90s for mainframe access (including the ones that did graphics). The font they used was very recognisable and has been replicated extremely well by the x3270 terminal emulator. The terminals themselves could not be operated on their own. You couldn't just plug them into the back of a computer and get them to go, they had to be connected via coax to a 3274/3174 control unit which was then either connected directly to the mainframe's bus via a rather chunky cable (this resulted in a "local" connection) or vla a comms link with a communications controller (this used serial, ethernet, or token-ring for a "remote" connection). I didn't know until relatively recently that the control unit handled a large chunk of the donkey work of managing the terminals. With something like a VT100, it's the terminal itself that handles holding a record of what is on the screen then working out how to put on the display, but with the 3270s it was the control unit that was managing the process. The physical terminals have long since been replaced with emulators running over TCP/IP.
And then IBM came up with the 5250-based terminals which was used for mini-computers like System/38, AS/400, and to this day, IBM i. My understanding is that the 5250 improved (but is not compatible with) 3270 technology. Both 5250 and 3270 protocols are very analogous to the early HTML web days in terms of function.
@@johnvriezen4696 I've not had the chance to use "i" or any of its predecessors although I have looked at getting hold of an old Power system to run it; turns out licensing is a bit expensive! The 3270 data stream is, on the outbound journey, more like VT100 or other protocols in that it is a set of orders saying where to put fields on the screen and what attributes they should have. This is all control codes and flag/data bytes, so not a markup system like HTML. Once the display is complete, there is no transmission back to the host system until a transmission action is taken (i.e. Enter, F1-24, PA1-3, Clear, Attn, lightpen, etc.). The control unit manages the user's interaction with the screen until an action is requested. The data stream the host receives will usually consist of the contents of any fields changed plus a record of the action taken.
My first experience with a roomful of terminals was at a call center in Dallas in the 90s. We just dumped data in, and it would autodial the next victim hehe. Every desk had a wyse terminal, a GTE rotary phone (you know the one) we still had to hold to our head, no headphones yet... and a big ashtray. The building inside was a dark yellow from the smoke. They kept the lights off to save power...it was sad.
The classic black one, or one that could theoretically be hung from a wall?
@@Chaos89P the terminal was whiter than white, the phone was a color I would call, "vintage yellow." Even new they looked old.
As someone who ADORES his own company and being left alone for huge periods of time, seeing his house out there made me want to move there. ❤
but you can't!!!🤣
For me the make it or break it for such a place is "can I get fiber optic internet run to my residence"
@@raven4k998 Clearly...
@@unlokia yeah I was just saying cause I know you want to move out there and be his roommate but his wife would object🤣
@@raven4k998I said that? I would wanna be alone. Hence the “I love spending time alone” comment 😂
That was one of my fav episodes of you so far.
Very instersting video as always, i really liked it, it would be cool if one day you talk about little terminals we had in the EU. For example in France we had the Minitel which was popular in the 80's and 90's, more popular than computers and they were useful to get information and order stuff online etc
The original Star Trek series DID have computers displaying graphics. For example, in the pilot "The Cage" the computer shows a graphical representation of the Talos System. In "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Kirk accesses the medical records of Elizabeth Dehner and Gary Mitchell which are displayed on a screen. They look like scanned copies of paper records, but I think we can assume they were meant to be something more advanced. In "What are Little Girls Made Of?" Spock brings up a graphic on the screen that shows information about planet Exo-III. The episode you showed had a display of Harry Mudd's arrest record on the screen. Other episodes show that the computers can record, store and playback photographs and video, something far beyond the capabilities of computers at the time. "Court Martial" has a playback of the Enterprise's computer log which IS prefaced with digital text that says "USS ENTERPRISE LOG. STAR DATE 2945.7" EDIT: And don't forget the bio beds with screens that displayed graphics of the patient's vital signs.
You've been to the convention circuit, so you know there are big Trek fans who notice these things.
Funnily, it has been reported that many Apollo control room displays were actually TV links to paper printouts elsewhere in the building . I don't know if true or not . But I do know the terminal in the spaceship was even simpler, with just a few digits and a numeric keypad, yet it had many features of modern PCs .
Yes, I thought about these things. But I didn't feel they really counted. Like you said, it was more like a photograph that just happened to have some text in it. It wasn't actually computer generated text. Now, by the time you get to "The Motion Picture" then you see actual computer text and graphics being displayed.
@@The8BitGuy I always had the idea that they were pretending it was something else and you were expected to suspend your disbelief. Basically, they were trying to depict computers being able to do things that computers couldn't actually do at the time, but since computers couldn't actually do those things, they had to come up with cheap ways of faking it. For example, computers of the time did not have anything even approaching the storage capacity or processing power to store and display photographs and moving video or even audio for that matter. So they would have a transparent photograph in front of a backlight and pretend that they computer was displaying a photograph on a screen. The bio-beds in sickbay were actually backlight paper depicting the idea of a digital display showing the patient's vital signs. Even most of the "graphics" on the TNG computers that used the LCARS interface were actually backlit paper. The real difference between TOS and TMP is that TMP could use real computers with the actual capability instead of faking it.
@@The8BitGuy Regarding your remark about the spacecraft displays in 2001: A Space Odyssey, those displays were all fake computer displays that showed what the film makers thought computers would be able to do someday, and I think they were way ahead of their time. The graphics were all in fancy fonts, not basic courier-looking stuff, and the wireframe images of the AE-35 antenna looked very much like something from CAD/CAM software, even though they were actual physical models made from white-painted wires and filmed while rotating to achieve the look on the screen. Don't forget that they also showed flat panel displays long before such things were possible.
I don't know what year, I think late '70s, maybe early '80s ... but I saw an IMAGE on a VDT (as we called them back then; Video Display Terminals) ... and I literally stopped in my tracks, dumbstruck at the sight. All I'd seen for a decade was white on gray or green on black, or yellow on gray background ASCII characters.
@The8BitGuy I want to say thanks. Your channel was the first retro computing channel i stumbled across. I hadn't thought about my Atari 400 and very gray market Apple II in a couple decades. Your channel led me a lot of other awesome retro channels including the very awesome @UsagiElectric channel.
I was waiting a video like this!! Thanks!
Fascinating. When I first watched Star Trek as a kid, I thought the sounds the computers made were supposed to represent the sound of hard drives working, a familiar sound which I grew up with. Never made the connection to mechanical teletypes.
Reel to reel tape drives is the noise I thought of.
Now I'm wondering what kids these days would think of it, growing up with devices that are completely solid state.
KFWB (in the '70s an "all news, all the time" radio station) had the constant sound of teletypes in the background ... I'm sure that was supposed to represent the sound of a real "news room" back in the day.
@@josephgaviota So did KYW. Probably still does; been a long time since I was near enough to pick it up.
I always thought it sounded like electromechanical telephone switches, like the ones at the Connections Museum in Seattle.
I would definitely pay for a dedicated 8-Bit Guy channel *_for history_* , when you do these historical shows I think it really shows the best of what RUclips does. These are amazing, David always throws down bangers just like Anders!
Entertaining, informative, nostalgic, and educational. But it's fun too :) Can't argue with that.
huh? aren't you literally watching the8bitguy channel?????
good consumer
@@youdonegoofed you done goofed
@@EtanMarlinI think emphasis on the word 'pay', as in, if it weren't free he'd be willing to pay for this quality content. Sounds like the whole premise of Patreon.
@@molybd3num823 we all done goofed 😔
informative and entertaining as per usual. Thank you Sir
I worked for Visual Technology from 1980 until 1987 with a good portion of my time spent as a technician on their terminals and equipment. The company designed and manufactured Z-80 based terminals that emulated various models such as the DEC VT100 and DEC VT52.
In the early 80s' the company acquired Ontel Corp. Ontel produced "intelligent" terminals which were more like personal computers. These 'terminals' had peripheral devices such as Hawk and Wren drives, floppy drives and other cards. Ontel was a big OEM manufacturer and created custom terminals used by Walgreens for their Inter-com RX system and became the sole supplier of terminals for Control Data Corp.
While working on this equipment, I learned a ton about both analog and digital electronics which led me towards a career in electronics and later MIS and IT.
I remember staying up all night, and a friend of mine and I banged out a gif2tek4207 program to display graphics in some of our labs. Yeah, these were the labs that didn't have the Sun computers. Only vt100s, some v52s, and a handful of tek 4207s.
@@argonwheatbelly637
Those were fun times. There was so much going on with all the innovation taking place. Computers such as the Centurion and the "intelligent" terminals by Ontel were quite advanced for their day. The Ontel systems were actually PCs or workstations that came complete with hard drives including those huge Phoenix and Hawk drives. They were bundled with various option cards and peripherals such as world-mover-controllers and Diablo daisywheel printers. The word-mover-controllers were used for copy and paste functions just as we use CTRL+C and CTRL+V for that today. They came as a bundle for some kind of word-processing setup that was supposed to compete with Wang.
It was working on equipment such as this that sparked my interest in computers and hardware. A couple of decades later, I was given some Sun SPARCs and they're still operational today.
Visual made a series of graphics terminals that emulated the Tektronix line. Their V550, V102 with graphics board, and their V420C color terminals had the Tektronix 4400-series emulation built-in. The V420 also emulated the DEC graphics terminal and had dual Z80 CPUs with one dedicated to graphics processing. For vector graphics, they used the NEC7220D graphics processor. This chip handled the line-graphics and acceleration so that data could be drawn quickly on the screens.
What an unexpected and fascinating episode. I could watch hours more of this. Thanks, David!
I too enjoy these vids :-)
You start to feel old when these things need to be explained.
What a great unexpected crossover. Hope you guys do more together in the future.
I was just thinking about the difference of computers and terminals yesterday, what a miracle! Thanks for explaining this, and really good footage. Looking at all these machines working is breathtaking.
Thanks, really well researched! That's the content I love the 8bit guy for! 👍👍👍
I had a couple Wyse terminals attached to my Linux machine before multiple PC monitors was a thing. Good times.
Nice to see you made it to the ranch. The other David has cemented his place as one of the premier retro-computing personalities with his unique blend of content. Nice collab!
Honestly this channel always keeps getting better, and it never fails to amaze and entertain us. I never regretted subscribing to this channel the moment I saw the first video about how mice work and what they see. Awesome! ❤
Best retro tech content on youtube by far, another great video with a great guest
The place I remember dumb terminals from most prominently (and fondly) growing up was in libraries that used them in addition to the old physical card catalogs. Especially if you were doing a term paper and needed to find out what articles were in periodicals about your topic. You'd look it up on the terminal, print the list of abstracts to the dot matrix line printer, then go through the list of brief abstracts or sometimes just titles and try to guess which ones were actually relevant to your term paper. Then you may have had to wait until your library borrowed the periodicals from another library to actually see and photocopy the articles. Does anyone know what kind of computer system in the library those dumb terminals would have been connected to?
I love these videos where you get out to talk to other people about history and they show their treasures
7:14 "So, this is the rotating drum...there's 8k of memory in there..." I just realized that I'm going to get to see Usagi work on this fantastic enigma...thanks for sharing this amazing video!!!
3:54 and THANK YOU for another showing of my table at last year's VCFMW! Honored to be used as an example in your video!
Ah the nostalgia! I had my first exposure to computers around 1970. A terminal with paper teletype. Even remember saving programs to perf tape😮
Anyone who used VAXen knows all about them. My college had a lab of them hooked into an VAX 11/780. Many fought for time on the VT 220s, I was satisfied with the VT 105s. One classmate I remember had limited vision. The 80 and 132 line screens were invisible to her, but the college's attitude was "not our problem". I added a double width command to her login_com file, and the waterworks began. She could see everything and do her work.
Yep, back when I was a computer tech, we had 7 VAX 11/780 systems. In addition to the DEC VT terminals, I also used to dial in from home, initially with terminal software I wrote form my IMSAI 8080 and later with Procomm+ on an XT clone.
Really was expecting to see the terminal they used for the show, Severance. Still, such an amazing video! :) Thanks for the upload!
I don’t know why, but your channel is so comforting and nostalgic.
Thank you for this video! I was born in 1995 so I only briefly remember using a terminal at one or two libraries that still had them to look up where a book was. I remember really loving the green text and how instant it felt to look up information compared to at the time how slow cheap internet connections were back in the early 2000's.
nowadays internet have been faster than before (2000s)
Another great episode a history lesson and an better understanding how terminals work. I was thinking about the vacuum tube terminal, and I think a good cheat for character set would be upload it via paper tape into whatever memory it contains, or a boot loader on the computer that would upload it to the terminal.
Thanks for sharing this!
What an amazing episode!