made a little terminal explainer, based on the original terminal

One of my favorite serial terminals. I first used one at university in 1980. In the mid 80's, I had a VT180 on my office desk. It's a VT100 with a Z80-based expansion chassis, running CP/M.

this is sick @jeffreyando

amaze amaze

Hardly the "original" terminal. But certainly the most ubiquitous and arguably, the most consequential terminal.

absolute fire video

see if bad apple runs on the vt100

👀 this one might be too easy

That’s why terminal apps are also called terminal emulators.

1982-1984 I programmed on one of those connected to a PDP11/44 at college. The PDP ran an operating system called RSTS/E. It didn't have VIM instead there was a full screen editor called EDT

A VT100 is a very heavy piece of equipment!

not too too hard to carry around but i can definitely only carry one piece at a time :)

Video's style resembles @Artoftheproblem a lot

original meaning the og terminal app or actually going further back

the original *physical* terminal, before we had terminal apps

this is so cool Nikhil!

@dabit3 Such a vibe

play doom

Based.

nice breakdown, super clear

fedora running on it is cool

Back in 2008, I was working with a Unix admin to get a $250k IBM pSeries system partitioned into LPARs. He insisted he needed a physical dumb terminal (CRT) to access the system, so the company bought him one. I don't recall what we did with it, but we ended up using SSH instead.

@silasalberti cool

Oh wow really great

Conjuring excited memories of looking up books at the Boulder Public Library

this is cultural appropriation. please show double height double width please. people don't realize how limited terminal apps are today.

oh nice! there used to be a line in this post about the double height double width and smooth scrolling in this post but i cut it to keep it simple

you can't get double height or smooth scrolling on modern terminal emulators!!! it's crazy

I'm too young to have used the vt100 (I started with the vt220), but that seems too slow. was that 9600 bps? I hope you're picking up a vt320 too, it's all around much better and twice the bandwidth. should be good for some

oh right, @aaronjanse showed me this a while ago but i forgot about it this is a good one to try

Yeah it’s true. It’s funny to think about it but no modern PC or Mac has a genuine terminal only a terminal emulator, never thought I’d see someone use the real thing in 2026

This was cool to watch as someone how never used a hardware terminal

now show the original CRT-free terminal printing onto a paper scroll :>

Here's my favorite terminal Tetris. In the past I've run it on an RPi connected to a DEC VT, but I just checked and it compiles just fine on MacOS...

You can see the roots still today: ~$ echo $TERM xterm-256color ~$ clear|od -c 0000000 033 [ H 033 [ 2 J 033 [ 3 J There's the VT100 cursor home ^[H, VT100 erase screen ^[2J and ANSI erase screen ^[3J. If there is a rogue for Macs, show us the VT100-dungeon :)

This is awesome! I wish I had this or a better professor when I learned about character encodings during my college years… Thanks for sharing! By the way, those would be ANSI/ASCII codes? Right?

this is really good. nice work

How about lowres osm/google maps?

ダム端末・・シンクライアントの原型か

Such a cool project, congrats. The video is really well done. Though, things have changed in the past 50 years, they're just backwards compatible 😄

I'm still trying to find someone who knows a lot about these to discuss repairs one the one I just got a couple of weeks ago. I drive from Alabama to South Carolina to get it and a couple of other terminals. The 100 is just absolutely gorgeous 😎

quite an interesting vid

Cool stuff