Brian,

The easiest thing is set up a BSD box of any flavor (I have a FreeBSD box that used to have modems on it).   Then grab a USB to RS-232C cable if it does not have a serial ports on it already.   Make sure there is a getty/login configured for the port and your are set.   At that point you can directly attach the terminal to the cable.    No need for the modem. 

You will get the user effect, accept for the sounds of the modem connecting and dealing with dialing itself.  If you wanted those, you could of course put the terminal on a modem and connect the BSD system to a modem. Then either use to two POTS lines if you want to spend money from the TPC.   Actually thinking about, you could also set up a POTS line emulator (which if you google you can make one pretty easily).

Funny, just this AM, I put into the the electronics recycling box at work 4 telebit "Worldblazer" modems and a POTS line emulator (and a bunch of other old junk).   I've been clean out my basement and I knew I would never use those again.

Clem

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Brian Zick <brian@zickzickzick.com> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:

On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Brian Zick <brian@zickzickzick.com> 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

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