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Wiring A Vintage Teletype To The Internet

Posted by simoniker on from the abacus-up-next dept.

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."

4 of 197 comments (clear)

  1. Not as useful as all that... by dkf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given the sort of spam that ends up in my mailbox, hooking the teletype up to print out the subjects of incoming mail messages would require upgrading the teletype to have UNICODE printing characters.

    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  2. Re:Why? by javiercero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nope this sort of thing is called a TERMINAL, your vtxx0 session is actually trying to emulate the behavior of a paper terminal. Betcha you did not know that :).

    A printer is output only, this device is input and output...

  3. No, you don't by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Compared to a teletype, a VT220 is fancy future technology. A teletype prints on paper, a VT220 has an actual monochrome CRT screen. BTW, hooking it up to a linux box can be actually quite useful if you have friends at your place and more than one of them wants to check their mail at the same time...

  4. Teletypes by galt2112 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When I was a radioman in the Navy, our division officer wrote a program to convert between BAUDOT (the 5 digit code used by TTYs) to ASCII and handle the protocol so we could edit messages on a laptop and transfer it to a TTY.

    He showed me the code, written in C.
    That was the moment I fell in love with programming, eventually got out of the navy and studied comp sci.

    Thanks, LCDR Meyers!