wrs
3 months ago
I did sort of the opposite of this by buying a real VT100 on eBay, restoring it to working order, and mounting a Raspberry Pi Zero W inside it that emulates a PDP-11. So instead of an emulated terminal with a real computer, it’s a real terminal with an emulated computer.
(In case you’re wondering, I had no sane reason to do this.)
sgt
3 months ago
Would love it if you could write about this and post it.
youngNed
3 months ago
I did something similar.
I bought a vt510 and hooked it up to my raspberry pi. My intention was to get some kind of VAX VMS OS on there, but as i played around on linux i realised something.
It really really sucks.
I had been dreaming of such a set up since i had been at the centre for computing history[1] and got so much nostalgia for the old DEC VMS setup they had. There is so much emotion brough back from just touching those machines, from the way your muscle memory kicks in as soon as you put your hands over the keyboard.
I was so damn excited for this.
but it was awful, the lag was the big one, but this wasn't from my set-up, this actually was how it was, the previously suppressed memory came back, sat in the computer lab at college, that lag was there - but yeah after years of iterm2, tmux and the advancements in the cli space - going back to vt510 really really sucked.
But it was a pretty horrible experience[2], and really affected me actually, it made me think a lot about nostalgia and how we remember the past.
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[1]https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
[2] please, these things are relative, it wasn't that bad, it just kinda sucked
II2II
3 months ago
I was lucky in that I went through my nostalgia phase when old computers were simply obsolete. That is to say, I was comparing spinning rust to spinning rust. Then modern spinning rust may have been significantly faster than obsolete spinning rust, but other factors partially compensated for the difference (such as leaner software that was written much closer to the hardware).
While I still maintain an interest in computer history, i.e. in a literary sense rather than maintaining hardware, it is from an entirely different perspective. I like thinking about how things would have been different if we, say, focused upon energy efficiency or if we minimized the number of layers of abstraction of if main memory was non-volatile. Of course these all involve trade-offs. The interesting thing is how these trade-offs would change the path of technological development.
Of course, it is entirely possible that there was only one viable path. It is nearly impossible to sell operating systems based upon technical improvements, so the emphasis is upon a bunch of end-user visible ephemeral trash. Similarly, it would have been nearly impossible to sell more energy efficient computers so the emphasis was on performance. (Even today, a laptop battery that lasts a day and a mobile phone battery that lasts two is considered good enough.) And, of course, the sale of those high performance processors financed the development of improved fabrication processes that enabled the development of even higher performance processors - and more energy efficient ones. It is unlikely that pursuing energy efficiency would have financed the development of processes to perpetuate itself.