22 Nov
2017
22 Nov
'17
8:39 p.m.
On Wed, Nov 22, 2017, at 12:55, Henry Bent wrote:
In short: the VT05 was DEC's first video
terminal, from the early
'70s, and would have presumably been in use at some installations that
used early Unix. My guess - and this is entirely a guess - is that it
had been entirely supplanted by the VT52 and friends by the time Unix
gained widespread popularity.
There is a pretty good overview of the VT05 at
https://vt100.net/dec/vt05.html and
http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT05 has a plethora of
pictures.
I have no idea why there are no termcap/terminfo entries for the VT05.
stty in BSD as early as 2.79 understands "vt05" as a settings
argument, but it's not clear to me what you would use for $TERM.
Looking at other versions, stty vt05 appears as far back as V6 (it sets
the newline delay - needed because scrolling was slow on the VT05 - and
clears other delays). This is evidence that it was probably used some
places as a dumb terminal.
The VT05 itself was 72x20, all uppercase, and did in fact support cursor
addressing etc, though there's no evidence any Unix applications ever
took advantage of that. TECO apparently did, though.