On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: > > On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Brian Zick wrote: > > > Would it still be possible today for someone like me to go out, and find > an old teletype terminal (an old ASR or DECwriter or something), set up a > phone line and modem and get a roll of paper, and then actually use it to > connect to other computers? > > > > I know it's not really practical today - but is it possible? > > Certainly it's possible. Although you would really only be able to do it > with an ASCII terminal. A DECwriter would work fine. For a Teletype > beast, you would need to make sure it used ASCII. But lacking lower case, > I think you would find it too painful to use, even though all the current > versions of UNIX (and Linux) I'm aware of still seem to support the > necessary case conversion in the tty drivers. > ​Hmm. So for a TTY that old there would probably be no option for lowercase. That does sound a little painful, especially if I wanted to edit modern programs..​ > Your biggest obstacle might be finding a host machine that still has a > modem attached that you could dial in to :-) > ​So perhaps I could simplify it and attach to a machine sitting next to the TTY - which then in theory could connect to the outside world via the usual means. I wonder, has anyone tried something like this? ​ > And, of course, everyone KNOWS the entire universe runs in terminals that > support ANSI escape sequences for colour and cursor positioning. Who needs > termcap? (I'm looking at you, git. And clang.) So you might find setting > TERM=dumb isn't quite enough. > > Also, ed(1) is a wonderful editor on a hardcopy terminal. Unless you run > it on Linux, which KNOWS the whole world runs on 24 line terminal windows, > and therefore ed needs to pause its output. ​I usually use vim, but before learning vim I learned ed and used it for about a 2 month space for editing config files and things, so that should hopefully be the easy part. :-)​ Brian Zick zickzickzick.com .:/ ,,///;, ,;/ o:::::::;;/// >::::::::;;\\\ ''\\\\\'' ';\ \ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: