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."

Comments

Ahh, teletypes.

[JessLeah]

I'd love to get an old teletype going. Ever since I read Hackers by Stephen Levy, I really really lusted after the old hardware. (The first computer I owned was an Atari 800; alas, I never got to play on a PDP-11 or a teletype, or punch cards on a modified IBM Selectric (or punch cards at all!)). I wonder if maybe some enterprising geeks could set up an 'old computer museum and workshop' so geeks can go and learn of their roots. I'd love to play with a teletype! (I hear the bell on one of those is an actual BELL!)

So Minsky... did it work?

[silentbozo]

Depressingly, although he mentions the rationale for choosing the hardware and software that he did, with links to vendors, he never mentions if the damn thing actually works! Where's the audio of the teletype humming away? The pictures of the latest weather report, pulled off of some website, displayed as printed text?

Re:So Minsky... did it work?

[hqm]

Yup, works fine. I even had it hooked up as an alarm clock, I had a cron job to print the news and weather at 7:30 AM every morning. In the original military cabinet, it was loud enough to wake people up upstairs, but then I put it into a quieter cabinet, and it was too quiet to wake us up anymore.

But we use it every day, our Yahoo calendar sends events to it by email (no I won't tell you the address), and we see a printout every morning of the next day's events, easy to tear off and take with you on your way out.

The original inspiration for this was from Tom Jennings' "World Power Systems" site. Check it out. I used his ASCII-baudot conversion routines.

Running the HTTP server on the teletype...

[Anonymous Coward]

I first thought that they managed to run the HTTP server on the actual teletype (something like a mechanical HTTP server!), so I was a little dissapointed to see that they used a modern PC motherboard for doing that.

Still, it would be nice to see if something like Contiki could be used for this beast as well.

From /etc/termcap

[Alien Being]

#### Teletype (tty)
#
# These are the hardcopy Teletypes from before AT&T bought the company,
# clattering electromechanical dinosaurs in Bakelite cases that printed on
# pulpy yellow roll paper. If you remember these you go back a ways.
# Teletype-branded VDTs are listed in the AT&T section.
#
# The earliest UNIXes were designed to use these clunkers; nroff and a few
# other programs still default to emitting codes for the Model 37.
#

tty33|tty35|model 33 or 35 teletype:\
:hc:os:xo:\
:co#72:\
:bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:sf=^J:
tty37|model 37 teletype:\
:bs:hc:os:xo:\
:bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:hd=\E9:hu=\E8:le=^H:sf=^J:up=\E 7:

Re:Teletype printouts

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

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 hence the old habit of injecting a kilobyte or two of formfeeds after the break so as to make sure the log printer was out of paper.

A friend, who shall remain nameless (though the setting was actually fairly benign), actually backed up the printer and 'X'-ed over the printout. But that was more for show, reverse feeding is unreliable, better yet to just run the printer out of paper.

A variation was recently used. A company HQ had a paper printer to log access cards as they opened the doors to the building. But, the printer was in a cleaning cupboard on the ground floor. The thief (an insider) just broke into it and took the paper logs with him as he left with his companions carrying a s*it load of computers.

The moral of that story is that paper is kind of fragile as a log material. Make sure it'll survive the calamity that the original equipment wont, lest you be standing with a long face with neither the equipment/data nor the logs.