Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal 

The bell! I forgot the bell! So I made a whole episode about it (them actually, as there are two): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-b2QPy-igBLA.html

as a software guy i fear to a soul level the madness that electronic engineers can do with just some equipment and free time

"Don't miss the next episode when we try to connect to Linux using messenger pigeon!"

@14:59 "Can you imagine developing the whole Unix system, line-by-line, on the line editor? Those guys deserve a medal". Yes, they got several Medals and the Turing Award for UNIX :)

I love that it's narrated like a tutorial, just in case anyone really needs a teletype terminal 👌

This could win any mechanical keyboard war at office

Apple: Your 2019 i(whatever) charger is too old for this 2020 i(whatever) device. Not charging. Linux: 1930 teletype? No probs.

When your mom tells you you have done enough screen time for today.

Imagine running vim on it and it constantly having to redraw the buffer

That's great. I can remember having fun with an old teletype at school around about 1980. I deciphered the binary aspect and manually printed my name by triggering the solenoids and turning the wheels by hand.

Disappointed we didn't get to hear the shell trigger the bell.

Most mindblowing moment at 3:26 - who else happens to have a 4U sized Serial Data Generator lying around?!

Imagine being at a typewriter like "Oh, I have to be sudo"

*Stares at typewriter output for a second* "Oh, I need sudo" Some things never really change, do they?

11:40 Man I expected the last login to be in 1931 :D

Neo: "You could hack the Matrix with a teletype" Tank: "Sure, pure bone and flesh. We can do it!"

Thanks to this video I finally understood what is intended by a 'terminal' in linux. I understood why a tty we open with ctrl + alt + F1 - F9 is called a virtual terminal. It is 'virtual' because it is not an electro-mechanical, big piece of iron, typing machine ('teletypewriter' or shortly 'tty'), as in the early days of Unix. And it is a 'terminal' because, despite so many years having passed, it still serves the same purpose: send a command to the OS as a string and show up the response from the OS, also in the form of strings. I appreciate your effort and curiosity. Thank you very much!

Pre-ASCII ASCII art, this is why i pay for an internet connection.

Reminds me of something I read about the Three Mile Island incident: the computer was printing out alarms on a paper log (as well as showing them via more immediate means) but there were so many events and the printer was so slow that it was several minutes before the significant event appeared on paper

I have a degree in computer science and a job as a programmer. Sometimes I forget how goddamn easy we have it nowadays.

I do a little bit on arduino/linux...I am visiting my grandfather who was one of the original teletype operators, and this project gave us a lot to talk about and helped me learn about his work. Thank you so much for sharing this incredible project!

iOS/Windows: This monitor is no longer supported, try a newer model... Linux: *Hold my beer*

Wow... Let this sink in for a minute: you managed to pair a contemporary Linux system with a piece of *90 years old* technology! 😮 Everyone who designed, built and used this almost antique device back in the day for its originally intended purpose, before it became obsolete, has almost certainly died of old age years ago. Yet this valuable relic from the past is still happily chugging along, as a monument to times long passed. I'm glad to see it in such pristine and well-preserved condition as well. Those things were obviously built to last. It's always amazing to see the old connected with the new. And in addition to being fun, projects like these are of immense historical importance as well! Splendid job. 😊

Linux running an old teletype...One of the best projects I've seen yet. This is fantastic!

Amazing! I thought I was the only one crazy enough to do this. Back in the late 60 s I put together a ham teletype station. It predated home computers. So when I got my Commodore Pet computer in 1977, I decided to use that model 15 as my printer. After a winter of effort, I devised a very good solution. With a simple handshake interface, and using the 2nd cassette buffer memory I came up with a machine language program that would read an ASCII character output on the IEEE port (by reading memory) it would convert it to 5 bit baudot and send it serially out a user port bit which keyed the teletypes current loop. For the pets special cursor movement characters it printed 2letter abbreviations like HC for home cursor. It also handled the upper/lower case shift issue correctly as well as printing return before line feed so that the print head had more time to get to home position before having to print another character. It was a difficult project since I had only 288 bytes of space and I had to hand assemble it since I had no assembler. I still have that pet computer and the software. I passed on the teletype years ago. It would be cool to resurrect that setup if I could only find a baudot teletype. Congratulations on your efforts to keep that old teletype going!

"Those guys deserve a medal." So true, and fortunately they got them! The National Medal of Technology, the Hamming Medal, and a variety of other awards that weren't technically medals. ;-)

Gears: exist Linux: It’s free processing power

Awesome video (and machine)! PS: I love how a bunch of my favorite channels always dub Mehdi's voice whenever they mention Full Bridge Rectifiers.

The first microprocessor I ever built was in June 1978, the CPU was a Signetics 2650 8-bit CPU and it was an Electronics Australia project, the 'computer' had a 20ma current loop and the 'operating system' used Baudot code (5-bit RTTY with a start and a stop bit). That talked to a teleprinter, just like this.

This reminds me of a school friend who connected a Telex terminal to a Commodore PET in the late 1970s. His father was working for the Austrian Postal Services (Österreichische Post), which had the authority over the telecom sector at that time. Via this channel, he could get a decommissioned Telex terminal (Fernschreiber). At that time, getting a printer was out of scope for a high school student. Also the computer was just lent from another colleague who was an early adopter of such things. My friend built a level shifter and wrote a driver (most likely in 6502 assembler via poking the code into memory from Basic) to use the teletype terminal as a printer. He then ran a disassembler on the PET and printed out the entire source code of the MS-Basic for analysis and self teaching. In Europe, the Telex system ran with 50 Baud. With the start and stop bits, this gave a maximum speed of 6.67 characters per second. This means, a line with 80 characters would need 12 seconds to print. My friend did not have endless paper on a roll, so he printed on single A4 sheets. He programmed the system to pause after one sheet was printed until the paper was manually changed and printing was resumed. It took in the order of 5 minutes to print one page and he was occupied for several afternoons until he had the full listing of the MS Basic source code. He then dug into it to understand how things worked. I remember how he found the routines for the trigonometric functions and how we discussed how this was implemented.

The restoration project was impressive enough but to interface it to modern hardware is some next level insanity. I still have friends who struggle to interface a USB dongle to a USB port lol.

Takes me back to my DJ'ing gig, where I doubled as the news reader. I sat at the teletype terminals and read the AP news releases as they came through. That sound was adopted by many networks to announce an "incoming bulletin".

My first time seeing this channel. I’m blown away great work! I’m really inspired to pursue more of what I love like you’re doing.

I would totally use this with a Twitter client. Live printed updates coming from your favorite Twitter account. Its so loud you wouldn't miss a single tweet!

Me: I only have 8gb RAM He: a giant memory of 2 kb

Very clever use of the speaker terminals for the resistors! Congratulations on 100k! Happy 2021 everybody!

This was GREAT! Something I've thought about and imagined for years...connecting a modern computer to a mechanical teletype machine. Thanks for the video, it is great.

"Aah, I have to do sudo." ^Linux in a nutshell

FBI: you wouldn't download a car CuriousMarc: can't hear you, printing out the Saturn V

Next Video: "How's it going guys, today I'm installing Arch Linux on this 90 year old computer"

I literally could not smiling the entirety of this video! Thank you so much fo your hard work and effort! This was absolutely amazing!!!!

That absolutely needs to run Zork, I'd love to see it slowly print out "you have been eaten by a grue"!

Lol imagine using this during the war and the enemy cracks your code only to find ASCII art being sent over the wire.

Aight, you got my subscription with this one. Very well done. Wish I had the equipment to play with this stuff. Working on it! So cool. thanks for the inspiration!

Amazing to think that they were still basically relying on these types of terminals even in the 70's.

Some time back in the mid 1980's when I just started "fooling around" with computerstuff, I had written a computer program that took care of some accounting tasks at home & on my job. It wasn't anything too groundbreaking, but I had put a lot of my time, & effort into it, and wanted to made sure I had a good back-up . But I'd had some bad luck with archiving programs on the magnetic tape drives & media of the day. However, I did have a fully functioning, 1970's era ASR 33 Teletype at home, which includes a paper tape punch and reader as part of its' assembly. So, to back up my program, I dumped it to the punch tape. It took almost a full roll, but it was the best option for me at the time. For a time, I also used to back up some important (to me) data on to punch tape, and I still even have one roll which was a back up of one of my early phone & e-mail contact lists. (Although alotta the people on it are dead now!) Once, I was interrupted by a phone call while emptying the plastic receptacle which held all the 'chad' from the paper punches and I set it down near the edge of a desk, where the cat knocked it over. Geez, I was finding those little yellow paper dots all over the house for the next 3 months or so. The cat got covered with them too & I had a polka-dotted puss till I was able to brush him off. I wish I had taken a picture.

When I first used a government computer system in the 70s, we still used punch tape. The women in the terminal room (men weren't allowed to operate the machines) punched all the data on baudot paper tape, and then sent them to the mainframe about 300 miles away over a standard dedicated telephone line. The return link was via the postal service, on printed cards and paper.

That was just about the cooles thing I have seen on youtube! I wish more people would gain the depth of knowledge about how their computers actually work, like you have.

Loved it! thank you for sharing this, it's a think of beauty

Full Bridge Rectifier ... LOVE IT :D

Seems like this should’ve been used in a Star Trek episode. Spock and Kirk are stranded in 1930 and Spock cobbles together a communication link through a wormhole to a 1960s computer through a teletype. The computer links to the Enterprise through the nascent ARPANET via ALOHAnet wireless transmission protocol and the world avoids global pandemic in 2020.

I'm not generally a jealous lizard, but I'm green with envy (more green than normal) at your being able to use Ed on a teletype ... This would be a dream come true + I love that there are hero-level nerds like you out there doing this :}

Marc, this is the coolest project i have seen for a long time :) Lovin it

I’ve always laughed at sending text messages by smartphone. All that computer power and you send what is nearly Morse code. This teletype connected to PC is like installing autopilot in a Wright Flyer. I love it.

I really loved this, I always thought of paper teletypes in terms of 1970s computer hardware, I never considered that tty and baud were such historical entities. I last logged in to a UNIX system on a real tty in the late 1988s. I was one of the first students using the graphical windowed terminals rather than crt terminals. So a real paper terminal was still a historical curiosity for us but useful for getting a quick print out. One of our friends was on the tty and we mischievously cat’ed a file full of CTRL-G’s to his world writable tty device on the shared system we were all logged into. It was writable because the inter terminal program needed to be able to send a message to their tty to tell them that you wanted to chat. The CTRL-Gs sound as bells and made his terminal bell sound continuously for some time. I’ll never forget his response. “Please don’t do that again.... people are leaving the room thinking it is fire alarm.... “ lol sorry ROS...

Ed, man! !man ed - Ed is the standard text editor.

Sep 2022: That machine has such a distinct sound used by many media outlets in the US in the 60s and 70s, usually background sound effect during news breaks. Wonderful!

"Looks like something happened at exactly midnight - could you pull up the system logs from then?" "Sure thing, 3rd filing cabinet on the right."

god this is beautiful, I need to get a teletype and do this to assert dominance on my coworkers

Oh my god, I've wanted to do that for sooo long and finally someone has done it, great job man! Edit: no I don't have a 1930 teletype but I have a more recent one from the 1970s that still works

ASCII art was my introduction to computers (at a 1968 open house at the U. of B.C.) Love that you pulled this off!

When I graduated, in 1974, I went to work for Terminal Communications in Raleigh, NC. When I started, we were still maintaining the converted teletype machines for customers. But we were moving on to Intel 8008 (and, later, 8088) microprocessor based terminals, using IBM printball printers and video data terminals Thanks for the blast from the past.

Dam, so this is how our ancestors watched RU-vid.

I used to repair teletype machines in the RAF back in the 60s,/70s great to see one actually working again.

Man thats insane. Great ... congratulations, I never imagine thats will be possible. Thanks for your work !!

"Join me next time, as we attempt to build a programmable SOC using a handful of sand and some copper wire scraps."

This is amazing in many ways. Of course the "full bridge rectifier" part is hilarious. I'm a long time Linux user but this really gives me an idea of what it was like in the old days. E.g. why commands and the output from them is so terse. Why "ed" is so infuriatingly spartan with it's feedback (and why would it work in the line-by-line fashion it does). I understood the general idea of teletypes but seeing it in operation is much cooler. Your interface circuit is neatly designed and built. Finally I like that HP serial stream generator. I imagine back in it's time that would be a real handy tool. Thanks Marc!

This is great. I started in high school on a PDP-8L with an ASR-33. Programmed in BASIC with line numbers. Brings back memories.

I just love the thought of an alternate universe where computing kept going but modern displays were never developed. Supercomputers outputting on something like this

Finally a real /dev/tty!

Just imagine an office full of these. You'd need hearing protection, but it would be so cool!

This is fantastic! What a joy to work on a project like this. Great job!

A more wonderful demonstration of electrical signals and digital translation could not be found! Every aspiring digital engineer should watch this!

ed wasn’t even the most ancient thing being used! And the ascii art was a super nice touch. Srs, this video is astonishing, brilliant, and beautiful. _thank you!_

WOW, it's 1972 again and I am at Western Union, just hired right out of electronic school. Learning trouble shooting skills that served me and saved me in the passing years. Your leg-adapter would fit right in, any W&R (wire and repeater) cabinet, that Uncle Wes would have. It needs a couple of analog meters, 'gotta measure the TX & RX current in real time! It was nice to see again the issues of speed & code differences again. We had 3 row TWX to 4 row TWX to deal with too. Thank God that nobody that I know of made a glass tty for BAUDOT. A baudot to 3270 box, is too Max Headroom too even think of.

This is a dream of mine. Ancient terminals logging to obscenely powerful (relatively) new hardware.

This is amazing! Such a cool idea! I was just telling my mom about linux's history and how unix was used with teletype typewriters! This is a great modern example!

most steampunks just settle for putting typewriter buttons on their keyboard, marc gets a teletype to be his keyboard

Baudot-art - when you don't want any of that newfangled ASCII rubbish...

Very impressive video. I love such kind of integration: vintage gear with tech gear. Thank you!

Great stuff! Thanks for taking us with you!

"Full Bridge Rectifier!" - ElectroBOOM.

That sure brings back memories of the old 110 Baud thermal printer with acoustic coupler my dad brought home from his Bell Labs days. I started my education as Unix System admin with that. I do love the sound that the Teletype makes. A fantastic video, with a well conceived and built interface.

Wonderful work! Enjoyed this very much!

Here I 2022. OMG what is this witchcraft you have carried out! That is absolutely amazing. I’m an EE major and don’t quite understand how it all works. Really cool. Thank you for making this video.

This may be the most hacked together thing I've seen in a good while... and I love it.

If aliens invaded, you'd be invaluable to the resistance.

This is soooo beautiful. Well done, my friend. Well done indeed.

Consider me jealous, I want a Teletype so badly. I've been wanting to do the exact same thing for years. Great execution, I really like the idea of having an Arduino-based ASCII to Baudot converter. Also that Dolch lunchbox is so cool

10:47 “Ahhh I have to do sudo”

I can see how you can really take command logging to the next level with this. Can't clear logs if its all ready been typed to a physical piece of paper in real time.

What a beautiful machine! It took me back to my early days (1971+) of computing with Flexowriters and ASR33 Teletypes, but by then we were using this new-fangled ASCII with 7 bit characters! Done some current loop hardware hackery too... I was writing low level code for serial ports less than ten years ago, though - some things don't change much.

I would love this… quite a classic typewriter terminal!

Hey, that teletype isn't encrypted! Someone needs to disable this obsolete and insecure device immediately!

"we need a 5 bit signal" 😄

C'est absolument génial d'avoir réussi à connecter une machine de 1930 sur un ordinateur de notre époque tournant sur Linux. Passionnant et brillant. Bravo ! 😃

That is pretty damn awesome, hats off to the inventor of the teletyper.

A mechanical marvel with hundreds of springs, levers, nuts, bolts and whatnot.

Pascal at least, and prob c++, has old, weird, character combinations to make up for characters that weren't accessible way back when. And they are preserved still into Turbo Pascal and Delphi. 🙂

That is awesome man. Great work!