I want to say I really respect your appreciation for machine shop safety concerns. Many people don't think about the fact that actually having a clear head while you're working is just as important as (or even more important than) all of the other safety measures everybody always tends to talk about. I once had a coworker (a tech job, nothing shop related) who was on some pain medication for an unrelated issue, but was still able to fully move around and do stuff just fine. One day after work he decided to go out to his wood shop to do some hobby woodworking, and came back to work several days later getting to explain to everyone why he was suddenly missing two fingers, because it turns out because of the medication his head _wasn't_ quite clear enough to avoid making a dumb mistake that he would now get to live with for the rest of his life. This stuff is not a joke. Never mess around with power tools if you don't feel absolutely 100%. It may seem like just a "stuffy head", but it can easily still be the difference between deciding to do something right or very very wrong at a critical moment.
I kind of was hoping that this one would have an amber phosphor, but the white phosphor still looks really good. I'm already feeling tons better, I should be right as rain in a few days!
Yeah. I think when I first encountered those as a child in the late 90s they were kinda on their way out. The county public library system used Dynix for searching the catalog and managing borrowed materials. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software) But it's very nostalgic in some ways and was very much a hallmark of a time before the internet/WWW.
Oh man what a flashback! Many many years ago (probably around 1985) my dad brought one of these home from his job in silicon valley... and because it had a modem that meant I could head into the wild world of BBSes. I am sure I was pissing off every SYSOP connecting at 300 baud and hogging the lines but it was amazing!
Or me using my C64 and a 300 baud modem. I know well the joys of a 40 column display connecting to an 80 column machine. Though, to be fair, when connecting to a C64 aware server, the petsci graphics were awesome. Later I did upgrade to a 1200 baud.
@@no1DdC In my they were all Atari-only (ATASCII), connected via an MPP-1000C modem at 300 baud. I remember a few of them being in SoCal (818) and I was dialing in from NYC (212), using dubious AT&T long distance codes we got from a wardialer
@@no1DdC Yup. Forums, warez, teleconference chat, games. My Apple //e had 80 columns so i didnt have to deal with 40 column most of the time. Apple bbs' could use ProTERM Special Emulation to get a semi graphical output which could also be used for gui menus and windows using mousetext. Later i used my apple to connect to a unix shell where i could chat on irc, access files via ftp, archie and telnet to play muds or chat
Kind of reminds me of the strange computer terminals in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, although given that this movie was made in 1985, it went for more of a 1950s retro aesthetic. Similarly small screens though.
"What did you do at work this week?" "On Monday i started a directory listing which finished on Wednesday. Then i had to do it again, this time with the printer turned on, which took me to Friday afternoon..." 300 Baud, baby!
When your previous interaction with the computer was through punch cards, 300 baud dial-up was GLORIOUS! Guy needs a landline and then set up a BBS for us to hack into.
That 300 BAUD really brings back memories, my first MODEM was 300 BAUD and I thought it was absolutely magical. I skipped 1200 BAUD and went to 2400 BAUD later and thought that was absolute lighting.
My first modem was 300 baud, too. I used it to get on an IBM computer at my college in the 1980s, so I could write and run my Pascal language class assignments. When I was done with the assignment, I entered a command that caused my assignment to print on a high-speed line printer, where it would be retrieved and graded by a teaching assistant. My class was the last to use that computer.
Yeah, same here. I had a neighbor with a 300 BAUD acoustic coupler (TRS, I'm pretty sure) that he decided he had no use for, and gave it to me. I didn't get a Hayes internal modem until a few years and a new computer later.
I do love your honesty. I made the mistake many years ago whilst on flu meds, I chose to use a band saw and nearly took my thumb off. Never again. I agree this one is cute.I know I should write a comment at the end but just wanted to jump in. Really enjoying your channel. Thank you. It’s a bit of reminiscing but also it’s what our technology was built on and you can’t ignore it. All the best from the UK.
@@UsagiElectric My limited experiance of double charactors on the screen was the result of the computer you were connected to sending the data back as to show a good connection and "echo on" being an option for when the computer did not echo the charactor back.
I did my grad work in Chemistry, and the department's library had a TI Silent 700 series terminal to access journal databases. How I wish they had this. And I just loved those clacky keyboards.
Well... I never thought I'd say this about a data terminal... but I agree with you it _IS_ cute, and it brings back some nostalgia for me from my days at college in the early 80's. I remember working on my homework assignments on data terminals in the computer lab in college, they were the larger 80 Column like the ADD's and Hazeltine and they were connected to the DEC-10 at 300 Baud for the students. Then one day I saw the "Special terminal" in a closet that is reserved for use by faculty, it was running it at 9600, that was a real WOW moment for me! But as we know, the technology improved and speeds ramped up quickly, the data communications got better, and the infrastructure improved; Today we have amazing high-speed connections that we take for granted, but it had humble beginnings and it had to start from somewhere.
If you really want to run it over a "phone line" without having an actual phone line, pick up a Hayes 1200/300 modem, configure it for auto-answer mode, and pick up a used phone line simulator for under $50.
The TMS1000 also was the brain of my first computer game, a Merlin! Much, much later I was amazed, that my cute game was using the first (or one of the first?) microcontrollers that existed! (And it was born the same year as I was! :D)
Ya want another one? Ours worked okay, than got silly. Never tried to troubleshoot, but never threw it out. Figured it was PMOS depletion-mode rot. Considered fleabay, but sending it to you sounds more useful, especially if it serves as a parts donor down the line. YT will notify me if you reply. Love your stuff. Ciao!
This little terminals big brother, the DS990 Model 1, watched this from across the room 😁 TI had some amazing products back in the 70s and 80s. What a wild time it was! Get well soon!!
It’s amazing how far computers have come in the last 50 years. What a clean example of a little data terminal. I graduated in the mid nineties and used computers quite a bit, started off in middle school with the Apple IIE system and went from there. We had an early DOS computer at home and I remember how huge of a jump it was to go to windows 3.1. Thanks for the video. Hopefully you are feeling better. Can’t wait to see the Bendix up and running.
The kitties were thinking.. hey I knew there's a cute little baby bunny around here SOMEwhere! I am SURE of it.. let me poke around here and there.. : )
That looks like what you'd see in a comic as a 70's computer. It's right up there with the Commodore Pet. Decades ago, I had a little Tektronix data terminal connected to a PC running Linux that I had set up as a router, mail server, and a few other functions for those of us sharing a two bedroom apartment. A company a friend was working for was dumping a bunch of them and he offered me one. It worked perfectly for the task and when not needed, I simply stored it on a shelf in the closet. I wish I still had it.
Very interesting, and cute, terminal. That's a cool bit of kit. I think you were confusing duplex with local echo though. Duplex is the ability to send and receive data at the same time, or not. (half being you can only send or receive at any moment, full means you can do both at the same time). Echo on the other hand is simply copying what you send to the local display as you send it. (so no-echo would rely on the host to send back what it receives from you so you can see it)
Indeed, I remember getting a printout of local BBS's that had all the phone numbers, that included what stop bits, baud rate, parity, and local echo or not etc. You knew you had local echo setup wrong when everything you typed ddoouubblleedd uupp
I went down a rabbit hole with a TRS-80 PT-210 data terminal... created a RS-232 expansion card replica for it (& posted on eBay), and retrofit its ROM (& posted the ROM mod) to support sending & printing lowercase characters as well (that involved reverse-engineering its font and creating/adding font bitmaps!). It's a thermal-printer terminal that prints on commodity fax-paper rolls (walked in and picked up a roll at Staples that works great), and... it, too, is a 300-baud terminal. It's a bit of a wild ride hooking it up to a modern *nix system and interacting with it - in fact, at work, I tunneled through my laptop and connected to a modern embedded system through Telnet. Can confirm, 300 baud is of limited utility and involves gobs of patience, but moreso is the lack of control-character support. No backspace, no line movement, nothing except a stream of characters. A lot of improvement has been made since then, but it's sure got its charm!
I remember the PT-210 thread on VCfed forums from last year or so. I was impressed with how most of its limitations were entirely in software. It literally came down to not quite having enough keyboard keys to tell it to do enough things. Yes, even the printer font was in the main micro-controller, with room for lowercase! It's more brilliant than you would expect if you hadn't seen the insides of the design.
In the late 1970s, 300 baud (30 characters per second) was considered "high speed" as compared to 110 baud (10 CPS). This reminds me of what I might have been doing with my Apple ll with a DC Hayes modem - also 80x24, upper case only. Anyone remember The Source, which lost out to CompuuServe? How much did those things cost at the time? Isn't that keyboard too small to type on comfortably? Enough power to run a CRT over a DB9 connector? Is that dangerous? Get well soon!
CRTs use high voltages, but they don't use much current. As long as the cable is well-enough insulated for a couple kilovolts, the RJ-style plug is fine.
@@McTroyd Didn't look like the base had any HV stuff on it. No flyback or anything. But a CRT that small, and B&W only, didn't need much current, you are correct there. But i bet the HV is all in the "monitor" itself. But 12 or 24Vdc over the RJ would have been doable easily, and not too much current for that type of cable.
@@McTroyd Not claiming i am correct, we'd need to see inside the monitor to really know. Just my gut call based on not seeing any obvious HV generating circuitry or components in the base chasis. I am more than willing to admit i might be wrong here. We really need to see more tear down or circuit diagrams.
That's a lovely thing. When I first saw it I thought 'wow, a TI SilentType but with a VDU' and that's exactly what it is. To a point, anyway. Get well soon Dave.
BTW if you want your own phone system for fairly low amounts of money I can recommend you getting an ISDN PBX. Since analog telephony standards are virtually identical all over the world you could get it from Germany where they are really plentiful. You can even get something like a refurbished Fritz!Box 7490 which is an ADSL-WIFI-Router with DECT and 2 analog lines (no pulse dialing) and an internal ISDN S0 bus for something like 40 Euros. A larger modular ISDN PBX like a COMmander Basic 2 will set you back something like 50-200 Euros depending on the modules installed, but that can give you up to 32 analog ports, 8 ISDN ports, and one S2M 30 channel port.
I wonder if you could log into basic ASCII BBSes with that. You can still dial into them today. I’ve done so with my USR Courier recently, actually. You may be able to set up a VoIP with an analog adapter…
I can agree milling when you’re sick is not a good idea. I’ve done it cause we needed to finish some small parts for a DOD project and I ended up faulting the tool changer in the HAAS twice, Also not thinking straight while trying to tram a vice in and issuing an M19 orientation command to watch the indicator go flying into the chip pan not fun. Get well soon hope sharing my experience with this also reinforces why it’s a bad idea.
I didn’t have a chance to watch Voyager when it was airing, work, school & family got in the way. Fast forward to the great binge-watch of 2020 and I finally got to see it. Gotta say, Janeway is up there with my fav captains now.
The article said that you could get it to show you a 40-column view of an 80-column screen... but I suppose that's something that the terminal would have to be set up to do. Maybe wih some kind of internal function. And without a manual or really anything other than the terminal itself, that might be difficult.
Nice! Agreed, it's a very well thought out design and construction. Was also cool to see the somewhat related TI-99 "toys" you have, including the acoustic coupler :) Get well soon, man! 👍
An easy solution to the phone line issue is to get a PABX like the SOHO SP-208. They require zero setup and allow you to dial between 8 extension lines with analog phones and Modems. Much easier than setting up asterisk pbx.
Terminal must be using a circular buffer with a race condition for scrolling you get a flash of what was on top of the screen at the bottom before it clears it
At the time it was common to scroll the screen by changing the line start address, with the VDU scan hardware managing wrap from the last screen line address. With this scroll method there is no time when a slow CPU can clear the old (now off screen) line without it being seen. A faster CPU would aim to clear the line of screen memory in the horizontal blank interval.
In the early 90s, I was working on a system that used dialup. Rather than get a bunch of phone lines from Bell, we had a box from radio shack that was a 4 line phone switch. The server was on a modem on port 1, so to connect we were dialing “ATD1 “ from any other port. Worked great until we ran out of ports. You need something like that for your server room. The ports were entirely analog so you could not use 57.6k modems, but anything slower would work great.
Modems will connect at slower modem to modem speeds and the RS232 ports will work at slower speeds. Because our modem issues were connecting to the computer side, we would lock the RS232 speed to the desired speed. If you considering getting a modem (do they still sell the things?) you should check the speeds they support. I may still have an old 300 baud one laying around here somewhere if I didn't get rid of it in the move.
@ 11:40 - should be relatively easy to trace the pin-out of the edge connector, design a memory board, and 3D print a case for it 😄 Spent several years on the bench programming TMS1000 based devices for telephony (intelligent office phones, small telephone exchanges) at GEC in the yUK. The chips really were designed for I/O, ideally suited for keyboards, buttons, 7-seg LED displays, all sorts of things. My all-time fave with a 1000 was a 76-nibble program to control the function buttons and status LEDs of a telephone: now THAT was programming... 🤓👍
What a beautiful machine! And a great video explaining it. (First time I saw a TMS1000 was in the MB Computer Battleships game I took apart as a kiddie, running the game and controlling a SN76477 sound IC.)
This thing would have been a budget hacker's dream in the late 70s/early 80s especially with that command module holding preloaded instructions. Not to mention being goddam adorable!
I think Local Copy would send both uplink and downlink information to a local serial printer. It's why there are two DB-25s on the rear panel; one is for a printer or TTY.
Cute! And yes, you absolutely need a PBX setup! But simply for connecting two 300bps modems you can likely get away with just a wire between them. For slightly newer modems you would need a power source in series with them, like a tiny wall wart (regulated DC) or a 9V battery. Especially the older modems that don't do dialing and answering are "always online", I.E. there is no handshake/setup phase. A PBX would be cooler though. Either go with something old analogue, possible electromechanical, or go with one that is modern enough that it can also do IP Telephony. If you go with IP Telephony, consider connecting it to a modern (-ish) computer running Asterisk with the add-on that lets you connect it to modern smart phones via Bluetooth. The modern phone will consider Asterisk as a headset, allowing Asterisk to make and receive calls. That way you can use your old analogue POTS telephones to make and receive calls routed through your smartphone. With multiple bluetooth dongles to the Asterisk computer each family member can be connected, offering endless possibilities to have complicated setups just for the sake of it. Or for that sake take/make calls using an old phone worth almost nothing when you for example are working on greasy/dirty stuff in your garage or so.
Imagine if modern laptops were made with that level of serviceability, now a days you have to take 10 screws and pray you don't break a plastic clip just to disconnect the battery or upgrade the memory and storage (that is if your laptop still has sockets installed for all that).
The flaky platter in the hawk drive must be marginal and more importantly, working, this means that its likely to be repairable too. Probably worth a look-see to see how you can recover it.
WOW! Even though this item is a little outdated for my needs, it's impressive how well it is designed. I would use those (form factor) design concepts in current products. How everything is 99% tool less disassembly... I was facing a similar issue with a 24x8 LCD display, trying to figure out how to format data to fit correctly...
That idea of a home terminal gave me Minitel vibes. Minitel was a home terminal that was use in France from the early 80s - users could use it to look up phone number, book tickets etc.
@@IlBiggo they probably mentioned Minitel because it actually lasted until the early-00s in France, whereas all the other interactive Videotex(t) systems in other countries were always pretty niche (and expensive) so were quickly abandoned even by their few users.
Oh, memories, and more memories! Not this particular terminal, but so much more others. I think my first color printer had been developed by Texas Instruments, although somebody else had made and sold my printer. It was based on color wax and produced fabulous color prints as long as I kept them from direct sunlight or other heat. Actually my first independent “terminal” was a Teletype. Not even 300 baud - I think it ran about 50 or 75 baud. Then, much later I skipped over the acoustic couplers, but still the modem was 300 baud. To be replaced by 1200 as soon as those became available, or more likely just affordable. Then 2400 next step. Further 9600 and finally unbelievable 56000 by US Robotics. But on another topic - all my pocket calculators, starting with HP-35, were surprising enough internally only 4-bit. I believe the last one, HP-42S was 8-bit. But enough this time…
I could see someone sitting behind this terminal at their desk saying, "It says here, you missed a car payment last October, and a mortgage payment in February. Oh, and is that an arrest? I'm sorry, Mr. Smith. You don't quality for a loan here."
Unexpected Marie Kondo reference! I literally brought down a bunch of clothes to Kondo-fold into an empty drawer while watching this, but that terminal was just too cool so I ended up not folding a thing...
I know well the joys of connecting a 40 column display to an 80 column server at 300 baud. I was a teenager in the 80s with my C64 and my Might Mo 300 baud modem. Around 1990, I upgraded to a 1200 baud Commodore modem. So much blazing speed. But the nice thing about the C64 was when you connected to a server for a C64. The PETSCII graphics were awesome. 1200 baud was plenty fast for downloading software with everything being limited to 64k. Many games were limited to 16k which was even quicker to download.
Fever dreams and similar weird ideas can be fun when you're sick, and I'm there right now too so...How about connecting that monitor to a hidden video camera inside the computer (preferably inside the monitor itself, aimed at the user) Set it up so as soon as someone touches the keyboard it turns back into a terminal, having recorded people's look of confusion. Or don't. I've got a few monitors that look basically just like that but they go on top of broadcast TV cameras.
I'm sorry to hear that you've been under the weather, but awww, what an adorable video to make while you're convalescing! I had hoped to head out to VCF Midwest today to take in the show and meet some of my favorite RU-vidrs in person (and I had hoped that would include you), but, alas, we're dealing with a li'l COVID this week at my house, so I decided the best thing to do for my fellow vintage computing fans is to sit this one out. 😓I live in the Chicago area, so maybe next year. Anyway, here's wishing you a speedy and complete recovery so you can get back to that G15 and Hawk drive and all the other cool content you have in your pipeline.
Pretty neat. All the time I was thinking - they took most of the guts of a 99/4A running in 40 column mode, attached a little CRT and some terminal rom. Job done. Nope...
Back in the day, there were often problems with hard disk platters expanding as they warmed up. If formatted from cold, they might work initially but fail during the day or, in summer, or if moved to a warmer environment, might fail all the time (unless moved to the cold, allowed to cool down, and rebooted). The trick was usually to not format and install until warmed up and, first thing in the morning, start the computer and heating (if in a site cabin) to warm up while getting coffee :) Maybe you have a related issue :)
The original PC could make an amazing terminal. I used a Unix Shell back in the day to use the old Internet. As good as the CGA display could be, the MDA or Hercules where even better. Sharper text and zero flicker. For then 360k per floppy was a ton of storage, more than most terminals could even consider.
Hey there. I hope you feel better, looking forward to the new videos whenever you get the strength to do them. I am disabled, so I know how debilitating being sick can be :-). Thank you for your videos.
If at some point you decide to keep the Centurion permanently online, you could put that in your living room or bedroom so you can work on it without going to the lab.
You would also need the analogue hardware interface boards but they are fairly readily available. I had one on an asterisk machine but quality wasn't that great.
