16 Aug
2014
16 Aug
'14
12:52 a.m.
On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon(a)orthanc.ca>
wrote:
On Aug 15, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Brian Zick <brian(a)zickzickzick.com> wrote:
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..
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.
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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