Slashdot Mirror
Wiring A Vintage Teletype To The Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Do you have an old teletype with a 5-bit serial interface sitting around that you've been itching to hook up to the Internet? If so, this article at LinuxDevices.com is just what you've been looking for. Henry Minsky has caught the Mini-ITX motherboard bug big-time, arguing that the tiny, yet full-featured boards can now compete favorably with more traditional embedded platforms." Minsky explains that: "Messages and alerts could be printed to the teletype automatically from remote locations (such as our Yahoo calendar), while a user could send messages and access services such as weather and news headlines from the teletype keyboard."
The Computer Museum in Boston closed several years ago, but apparently their hardware went to the Computer History Museum.
I knew then, knew utterly,
the deal done in my heart forever,
though how I knew not,
nor ever have.
better? inkjet????? lcd??
the whole point of such to-paper logging is to log things so that the alerts can't get destroyed afterwards(because of a hacker, or because the machine has melted) by the computer. and i would presume dot matrix to be a LOT cheaper in the long run than paying for large amounts of ink for inkjets(not to mention the feeding system in inkjets tends to suck for such application).
and it's not exactly 'like they used to be', they still do it in critical places (or places where some 'hard' proof is needed for logs).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"I hear the bell on one of those is an actual BELL!"
The first time I used a teletype machine it was set up as a TWX terminal. You would turn on the paper tape punch and draft a text message using the keyboard and/or input from the tape reader. There was a "Here is" button which would automatically generate the id string of the terminal.
Once your tape was ready to go, you would dial (really dial) a phone number on the built in telephone and when you got the carrier you would start the tape reader and the message would print out on the remote side. As I recall, there was a control code that would enable the remote tape punch. And yeah, it was a real bell. There was another control code to ring it and it was customary to ring it a few times at the end of the message so the remote operator would know to pick it up.
It wasn't unusual for the person on the remote end to type in a quick "thanks" before the call ended.
One of my father's first jobs was as a reporter for UPI. He could "edit" a story by reading the punched holes on the 5-level paper tape.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"Where's the audio of the teletype humming away? "
They hummed when they weren't doing anything. When they started working they went ding ding and kachunk kachunk. The tape reader and punch had their own noises.
Theres a program called heavy metal that allows you to connect your teletype to your box and be able to surf the web, check the weather, stock quotes, telnet into other machines, be able to convert ASCII into 5-bit and and read e-mail.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
You might wanna use a Crystal Semiconductor CS-8900A if you wanna go directly to ethernet, or you may wanna use one of the AVR parts with the built-in UART if you wanna dialup. Yeh, you will have to write a little proggie to make tcpip packets... but you don't have to include everything... just the basic text stuff. Most likely somebody has already done so.
I am looking into these for some of the robotics stuff I work on. They look really nifty - especially when the whole shebang fits in so nicely with my motion control stuff. The ATMEGA series has a hardware multiply, so that makes the 32-bit Multiply - Add routine efficient enough for me to use for a lot of the DSP routines I need for control algorithms.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The real point of the article was to point out that the Mini-ITX board, because of its PC compatibility and the price breaks due to consumer use, is now the embedded board of choice for standalone appliance types of projects. I think this is significant because it marks a crossover of the consumer hardware into to the embedded space, and also because it allows Linux to run in a huge new set of non-desktop areas.
The example with the teletype was really just a way of contrasting an app that previously would have required an industrial controller type of board, and now can use a consumer board.