VT100 and emulators.

[woodchips]

This thread split from here.

I have a VT100, none working, just get an 'E' in the TL corner. Can find everything about them on the web but the circuits, and priority and importance of fixing has consequently slipped somewhat, now just gathering dust. Bob.

[G8HQP Dave]

There used to be VT100/VT320 etc. emulators which ran on a PC. Someone might have one lurking in a cupboard somewhere. Which operating system does your 11/70 have - RSTS or RSX? We used RSX-11M and M+, programming in Coral 66 and Macro-11. Commercial people usually used Cobol on RSTS. As yours is called a Data System I suspect it will be RSTS.

[donutty]

Hi Woodchips. Would you be willing to part with it? I'll PM you.

Not too keen on using an emulator; I've got other serial terminals (such as an a ADM5) and some that have a VT100 mode, but nothing beats the real thing. I've got the long term aim of setting up a museum of sorts (so not just for my own personal entertainment) so 'matching' hardware is important to me.

It has no OS because it is disc-less. Getting the hardware all up and running will be my first job. Thanks for your suggestion of which one to eventually get running though. Any idea of where to get? I think DEC still holds all the rights to the software so I can't (legally) just get a 'copy'

[G8HQP Dave]

DEC 'merged' with Compaq some years ago and has now more or less disappeared. About the same time they lost what little interest they still had in PDP-11 systems and sold the rights to an Irish company called Mentec which made a faster PDP-11 using bit-slice technology. (I and my colleagues helped them debug their firmware by running or systems on their board.) It may be that it is now impossible (or very expensive) to get a legal copy of any PDP-11 operating system. See Wikipedia.

DECUS (the DEC User Group) negotiated a deal for hobbyist use of VAX/VMS on their 32-bit machines but this did not extend to 16-bits.

I agree that a VT100 emulator is only second-best - particularly bad for screen-based editing using EDT!

[AlanBeckett]

Originally Posted by G8HQP Dave

I agree that a VT100 emulator is only second-best - particularly bad for screen-based editing using EDT!

Odd that. I used a DOS based VT100 Emulator for years, and it worked splendidly. The biggest advantage I found was that you could change the colours - I always favoured white on blue And yes, I used EDT.
The downside is that I can't remember what it was called, although I may have some floppies in the attic.

Alan

[ronbryan]

I found that KeaTerm terminal emulator software worked well on a Windows PC as a VT100/220/340 emulator, but you needed to have a LK250 keyboard to give the 105 keys that DEC used, compared to the 101 keys of a standard PC.

Ron

[PJL]

What about MS hyperterm under programs->accessories?

[paulsherwin]

Hyperterm isn't a great emulator. I used to use DOS MS-Kermit which is a very accurate emulator and will run on practically any PC hardware, even a prehistoric 8088 system. It will even work over a TCP/IP connection with a bit of fiddling. Just Google to find a copy.

1970s PDP screen editing software was actually designed to use an earlier DEC cursor addressable terminal called a VT52, an enormous beast. MS-Kermit will also do a VT52 emulation.

There are several versions of Unix that can be run on PDPs but loading a bootable system onto a disk may present a challenge.

Dave, I actually worked for Mentec for a while during the early 90s after they bought out my employer.

[donutty]

Thanks for all the info guys. A lot of veterans out there it seems!
Of course, if I could get hold of a VT52 that would be great too. Keep your eyes out

Thanks for setting up this thread admins.

[G8HQP Dave]

My contact with Mentec was probably in the late 90's. They were hoping to sell their new faster PDP-11's to the power industry, so we checked that the software (with a home grown operating system) ran OK. We found one or two opcodes which didn't quite work, so they updated the firmware. I don't know if they actually sold any to us. We found Mentec much easier to talk to than DEC!

The main problem I found with emulators was the keyboard. My boss would not pay for a DEC keyboard for a PC. I remember using a VT52, but was quite relieved when the VT100 came out - much better! My favourite was actually the VT320; I had an amber screen.

[RobinBirch]

The best emulator that I found was Reflections that did a very good emulation of all of the standard VT terminals. IIRC the version that I used to do would do everything including regis graphics.

I never had any luck repairing VT100s I'm afraid.

Robin

[donutty]

Just to let you guys know I have collected and repaired the VT100

But if anybody has any others to get rid of.... just let me know!

[jenkinsrichard]

I currently use PowerTerm 525 which I believe came with DEC's Pathworks offering for terminal emulation. It does not allow graphics though.
Richard.

[space_charged]

Originally Posted by G8HQP Dave

DEC 'merged' with Compaq some years ago and has now more or less disappeared. About the same time they lost what little interest they still had in PDP-11 systems and sold the rights to an Irish company called Mentec which made a faster PDP-11 using bit-slice technology. (I and my colleagues helped them debug their firmware by running or systems on their board.) It may be that it is now impossible (or very expensive) to get a legal copy of any PDP-11 operating system.

I've worked with DEC kit since the mid seventies. Back then it was a pdp-11/45 and DOS/BATCH V11. That was at the University of Leeds. We then upgraded to RSM-11/m (V3.2). Later on I moved to the University of Birmingham where I still am, and I set up a pdp-11 system also based on RSX-11/m. Further down the line I upgraded the pdp-11 to a VAX-11/750. That in turn became the boot node of a local area VAXCluster (LAVC) running VAX/VMS V4.6. These days I'm interested mainly in the Linux side and l play with hardware too. I wrote device drivers both for RSX-11/m and VMS.

I still have my distros for RSX and some versions of VMS. I have a few real VAXes (vaxstations) and a couple of Alphas as well as some pdp-11s (lsi 11-23+).

These days I rarely power up real hardware. I have simh which has versions that emulate pdp-11s and VAXed, amongst other vintage hardware. Simh is free and you get the source.

I have a Vt100 and three VT220, one white, one green and one orange screen. When using simh I prefer to connect a "real" terminal. I've got simh on a raspberry pi runing pidora (Fedore Core 18) and I can run RSX-11/m on that. The sysgen I've got for that RSX system has the console DL11 and to further DL11's. Simh can also map the emulated DL11s to a telnet visible port so you can make it available on the net.

Charles