Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Building a 2:3 Scale VT100 Reproduction

It's likely that if you are a few years younger than me, your first computer experience was on a VT100 terminal hooked up to a DEC minicomputer. My talented cousin, Michael Gardi, falls into that category and has created a 2:3 scale VT100 terminal to go with a PDP-8 emulation kit that he purchased. 

I've been building Oscarv's (https://hackaday.io/obsolescence) wonderful PiDP-8/I (https://hackaday.io/project/4434-pidp-8i) kit. While I was sorting parts and installing software I started thinking about how I was going to access my "new" machine. Now I know that I can just SSH, telnet, or VNC into the Raspberry Pi running the show but where's the fun in that. It makes me sad now that I eventually got rid of all the serial terminals I had lying around (mostly Volker-Craig models since I live in Waterloo) because that would have been a great way to demo the 8I. When I went online looking for a vintage terminal I got a severe case of sticker shock. So I decided to do what I do and make a "front end" terminal reproduction for my soon to be completed PiDP-8/I.

It looks good and I'm looking forward to seeing it when I visit Mike, hopefully later this summer, when it's safe to travel again.  

 

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