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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."
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?
No.
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!)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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?
So you can glance at your spam in hard copy format before you throw it away?
Actually that would probably be a good angle to sue spammers for wasting your resources, given that it's illegal to spam faxes for the same reason.
In other news, this sort of thing is called a PRINTER in 2003. It's typically connected to a COMPUTER which is connected to the internet. It's quite possible to print remotely using Windows, particularly to leave spooky messages on your neighbour's printer over residential cable modem setups that have very very bad security.
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'!"
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.
Hook this bad boy up to a machine running ASCII Quake, and give new meaning to the term "Frag"!
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
I was planing on doing the same, except the teletype I have is much newer (its a DEC) im not sure the model number or anything however.
I was just going to write my own version of lynx that just dumbs the whole page or somthing like that. One idea of mine was to create a "web shell" or somthing as it would be fun.
The teletype I have can go up to 9600 baud, and I have a bay networks remote annex lying around so I thought I could use it.
I have a VT330 as well but its stuffed, oh well I might fix it. A VT220 would be cool, however I cant find one ata cheap enough price.
(nervously) Who sent you?
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.
A VT220 terminal sitting here in a box, too precious to throw away, too useless to do anything with except perhaps hook up to a Linux box as a useless console.
And now I can hook it to the Internet! This is seriously useful stuff. Maybe I can make it beep as the text appears, in double size, so that people can see I have a REAL computer!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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
#### Teletype (tty)
:hc:os:xo:\
:co#72:\
:bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:sf=^J:
:bs:hc:os:xo:\
:bl=^G:cr=^M:do=^J:hd=\E9:hu=\E8:le=^H:sf=^J:up=\E 7:
#
# 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:\
tty37|model 37 teletype:\
The bell is real, but the teletype itself makes so much darn noise that it would be ideal for notification of alerts needing immediate attention. My anecdote us that a friend once hacked one into a being printer for an Apple][. Not only did it make a din during normal operation, because his was missing some structural support it would occilate and bang into the adjacent metal table. Not everyone in the area had the same level of appreciation of this feature however. ;)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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!
Hey! That's SCO code!
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
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...
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.
Stefan Axelsson
I once worked for a company whose business cards had a Telex number on them. At a trade show, I gave a young feller my card. He studied it briefly and pointed to the Telex number at the bottom asking what it was. I said, "That's our Telex number." He looked at me and asked, "What's a Telex?" "It's a Teletype that can store messages", I replied. He seemed to nod, acknowledging my answer but then asked, "What's a Teletype."
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Of course, inputting commands is rather trickier...
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!
The first time I used a computer was 1971, when I was a student at the University of Michigan. The air Force had just bought them a brand new IBM 360/67 with 1.5 Megs of RAM for $14 Million. You could submit programs in batch mode via punch cards or use the computer in time sharing mode via terminals. Some of the terminals were based on IBM selectrics, and they were pretty sweet. You could type on them as on a regular selectric typewriter. Most of them were teletypes. Model 33 IIRC. The teletypes were nasty. The keys had about a half inch of travel and they had to be pushed down all the way to work, which took considerable force. Touch typing was out of the question. You only used those things for very breif edits.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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.
I had one of these units in 1976. Best I could determine, the thing hadn't been powered on in 10 years (at that time). The unit was built in the late '40s. It had a large condenser which was used as a spark suppressor (for trans-atlantic cable runs, as best as I knew). I removed it, and wired it to a KIM-1 as a terminal.
Problem was that the motor coils had grease or oil in them, and would start smoking if the unit was on too long. I junked the unit after a few years (wish that I had held on to it now).
Everything was mechanical (a series of combs activated by 60hz from the line to decode the baudot code. 2 stop bits needed to allow time for the combs to reset after a character had been printed).
Now, its 2003 and these things are STILL operational. Wow. That's 50 years after they should have been retired. These days, printer mechanisms seem to wear out in a couple of years.
Note to all the young 'uns. These '15 teletypes used a typewriter-like mechanism, with a comb to allow only one type bar to impact. Speed was 5 characters per second. At 5 bits per character, no lower case characters. There was a figures/letters shift (two reserved characters - no more state than that - remember the decoder is mechanical). '33 mechanism used a type-ball. 10 characters per second, and used ASCII. The '33 also didn't support lower case.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Wow...they still make those things!?
:)
My first experience with punch cards was 20 odd years ago, at the University of Illinois. Dad would work in the lab and I'd use the left over punch cards as bookmarks (or chew toys...5 year olds do that sort of thing). My memory is hazy but I also remember the giant dot matrix printers and the audio modems that you put the phone handset into.
A few years ago, I was in the office of one of my comp sci professors and he had this huge box of punch cards. I asked him for some and he gave me 1/4 of the box. I use them as bookmarks still, except that now you can find them in Apache The Definitive Guide and Programming Perl rather than Winnie the Pooh
What is your Slash Rating?
Actually, you can overclock a teletype quite easily. Just change the gearing from the motor. I 'clocked' this one up to 75 baud from the stock 45.5 baud. But that is a factory approved setting. I don't know how fast you can gear it before it explodes though.
1 o.o.o.o
2
3 o.o.o.o
4
5 o.o.o.o
And of course, if you ever get gibberish, you should physically observer the tape for a messages:
1 ooo...o..ooo..ooo....o...o.ooo
2 o..o..o...o...o......oo.oo.o
3 ooo...o...o...oo.....o.o.o.ooo
4 o..o..o...o...o......o...o.o
5 ooo...o...o...ooo....o...o.ooo
I already tried it.
The pop-up ads were hell.
So I'm going to be using an Altair 8800 front panel for web surfing, instead.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.