Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 มิ.ย. 2024
- Commenters requested that we use our restored vintage 1930 Model 15 Teletype as a terminal for Linux. Hooking up a 5-bit mechanical contraption that predates computers by eons to a modern OS, even one that is terminal friendly, is not without some challenges. But hey, they are both clever, lovely, and digital! Should work, right? It had to be tried.
[edit] And now you can hear the bell(s)! Actually a whole episode on it: • Teletype Music? The Mo...
My TTY interface box hardware and software details are available on my website at:
www.curiousmarc.com/mechanica...
Here are the ASCII art files:
www.curiousmarc.com/mechanica...
I realized after making the video that the analog interface circuit should be credited to TeleTweety (Eric Volpe), who has all kinds of fantastic teletypes running twitter and other things at his home:
/ teletweety
He tweets from his teletype (in all caps!) at @teletweety
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:30 1930 'Model 15' Teletype Overview
1:52 Making the analog interface
3:28 Test using the HP 8018A Serial Data Generator
4:23 Arduino Software
5:44 Finished interface test
8:20 Linux hookup
10:00 1st Login attempt, no cigar
10:53 2nd Login attempt, success!
12:18 Using the line editor 'ed' on the teletype
15:02 Printing ASCII Art!
16:00 Saturn V rocket printout
Our sponsor for PCBs: www.pcbway.com
Support the team on Patreon: / curiousmarc
Buy shirts on Teespring: teespring.com/stores/curiousm...
Learn more on companion site: www.curiousmarc.com
Contact info: th-cam.com/users/curiousmarca... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The bell! I forgot the bell! So I made a whole episode about it (them actually, as there are two): th-cam.com/video/b2QPy-igBLA/w-d-xo.html
printf '\a%s' "Dinner's ready!"
Lol
ElectroBOOM at 2:24 !!!
BOm
Your machine is sooo cooool
This could win any mechanical keyboard war at office
*war office (before dept of defense was dept of war)
It wins by sheer mass alone.
@@0xFFFFF36 brown switches
Lol mechanical keyboards are great in college typing at 120plus wpm... professor in some classes could the automatic rifle slow down please... back in 2004.... long before my stroke in 2010...
But its a fax machine?
"Don't miss the next episode when we try to connect to Linux using messenger pigeon!"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
@@PileOfEmptyTapes Why am I not surprised there is a wiki entry for that. The amount of tongue-in-cheek humor in that article is amazing.
@@Rhynri It was an RFC long before it was a Wikipedia article, that's what should impress you.
The article was written in 2006 (Wikipedia was started in 2000) but the protocol was suggested in 1990 🙂
@@digital_gadget That's even better!
as a software guy i fear to a soul level the madness that electronic engineers can do with just some equipment and free time
I can confirm that reality bending to your will does feel awesome.
As an electrical engineer, I absolutely loathe the bloat most software guys can create using just an editor, a compiler and time. Ken Thompson built Unix using PDP7 with 8k words of memory. On my system, only "/bin/ls" has 141880 bytes. And the task is "super complicated".
@@miroslavstevic2036 womp womp
@@miroslavstevic2036 i do software and your feelings are completely correct, however, don't forget the fact that most of us are completely also have no clue how hardware works even at the most basic level, making it even harder to understand how in the hell did we get hired at all.
oh yeah and we also get mad if you misgender our beloved "IDE" (bloated dumpster fire with "intellisense" (which does NOT work most of the time)) because 90% of the software bums look like Quake 1996 enemies with more labels than storage in your computer and flags resembling a cracked LCD.
@@miroslavstevic2036Too much hadware abstraction nowadays. I had a liltle experience with assembly programing 8 bit chips before college, when I saw my collegues programing arduino they didnt have a clue about what it was doing, it was just about calling functions and adding libraries. Limited ROM, RAM, speed made engineers put the effort into efficient coding. Look at that very own youtube interface, slow, completely bloated.
I love that it's narrated like a tutorial, just in case anyone really needs a teletype terminal 👌
This is where we'll end up with the way modern society goes, where everything spies on you and blurts out to the overlords every thought you have and maybe disagreeing with their policies.
They won't even know what this is, they will get bits but unable to even crack it
This would make for a great sci fi movie of a parallel universe tech, like the steampunk, this to be teletypepunk genre
Teletype is completely unencrypted so unless you get real accepting of spying real quick it's going to suck
Disappointed we didn't get to hear the shell trigger the bell.
Pretty much would have occurred without the alias turned off, as any unknown characters would be remapped to either null or BEL.
I think we actually *do* hear the bell during the ls command for some reason.
13:01 or thereabouts, between "TMP" and "VIDEOS".
@@dizzym9554 Could be similar to old typewriters where it sounds the bell once you're close to running out of space on a given line
Bell is figures shift G.
@@kreuner11 Correction. It's been a few years since I used TTY. US Baudout had a shift to numbers function and a shift to letters function. When shifted to numbers, the bell was S. I looked it up here.. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code
That's great. I can remember having fun with an old teletype at school around about 1980. I deciphered the binary aspect and manually printed my name by triggering the solenoids and turning the wheels by hand.
Woohoo, we even have TH-cam electro-monkeying royalty visiting my channel! Nice to see you here BigClive and thanks for the comment!
How rad to see Clive here
Got to use a teletype system in 2019 in the Netherlands: it was used as a demonstration of the technology, and I hammered out a good 15 minutes of conversation with someone a few hundred feet away. I enjoyed it!
I and a couple of friends were doing some urban exploration in the mid 1980s and entered an underground military shelter. We found most of the place was empty, but the power was on as were the telephones and there was a room with ten teletype machines. There were many printed slips concerning a simulated atomic weapons attack on the UK. One wall had a large map of the south of the UK marked with mushroom symbols. The printed slips had numbers for radiation levels and mortality rates.
You did the same thing, lol, My Acorn Electron just sends morse code to it, guess you did the same, did not needed any modifications, only i remember a basic code program i did for it.
When your mom tells you you have done enough screen time for today.
Can it output 60fps video? Or at least 30fps. I dont like playing whit 100fpm(frame per minute)
Noice
@14:59 "Can you imagine developing the whole Unix system, line-by-line, on the line editor? Those guys deserve a medal". Yes, they got several Medals and the Turing Award for UNIX :)
It's like a mitch hedberg joke. They deserve medals. They got medals, but they deserve them too (I used to to do drugs- I still do but I used to to)
Pre-ASCII ASCII art, this is why i pay for an internet connection.
*Baudot art
Snoopy? Saturn V rocket? Well, as I remember our DEC PDP-11/20 in high school had one *other* ASCII-art it could print too. I believe the file or command for it was called "playboy". Any guesses on what it printed?
yesssss
11:40 Man I expected the last login to be in 1931 :D
But MAH Unix time!
@@azzajohnson2123 Oh, did you forget the sign bit:
"There was originally some controversy over whether the Unix time_t should be signed or unsigned. If unsigned, its range in the future would be doubled, postponing the 32-bit overflow (by 68 years). However, it would then be incapable of representing times prior to the epoch. The consensus is for time_t to be signed, and this is the usual practice."
Giving an earliest possible date represented as Friday 1901-12-13
@@EwanMarshall I often see files with timestamps of December 1901 when they have no real attributes, and was curious how that worked since Unix time went back to 1970. Now I know!
@@kaitlyn__L yeah, though it is 10000000000000000000000000000000 (2s complement notation if you want to understand why this is and how it works) :D most systems I see, tend to use 0s when it is filling in from empty/unreadable data
Azza Johnson I never tried it, but maybe negative timestamps work. That zero equals 1970 doesn’t mean that you cannot go before that.
Imagine running vim on it and it constantly having to redraw the buffer
oh god no
oh god no
ed!
That's why vim has a ed mode. It is specifically designed for printing terminals.
Vim doesn't redraw the entire buffer, it jumps around using SGR sequences and overwrites the characters that need to change. That wouldn't work on on this machine, though
Imagine being at a typewriter like "Oh, I have to be sudo"
Reminds me of something I read about the Three Mile Island incident: the computer was printing out alarms on a paper log (as well as showing them via more immediate means) but there were so many events and the printer was so slow that it was several minutes before the significant event appeared on paper
Yup, that's absolutely true and what's even more alarming, one of the printers suffered a paper jam creating a new system error that really clouded the information available to make clear decisions. When I studied the event as a breakdown of the human-computer interface, all these problems came out. Maybe no-one watched the 1971 movie "The Andromeda Strain" and the problems they had with their teletype :P This is a good read www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/7053806
the printer was in fact so overloaded that the vital alarm showing that the relief valve was still open came 4h after the meltdown.
Didn't remind me of that little but important detail in that accident but now that you mention it....
Btw. this is a very nice presentation of said incident: "Who Destroyed Three Mile Island? - Nickolas Means | The Lead Developer Austin 2018" th-cam.com/video/1xQeXOz0Ncs/w-d-xo.html
300 baud, according to Dr. James Mahaffey, "Atomic Accidents" (and I believe he is trustworthy on this topic, as he developed computing upgrades for reactor control systems in response to new regulations following TMI)
A very creative LEAN team with management mindset wanted SMS notification at my former company. We had a SCADA system and all of the alarms and messages of the utility systems were integrated. They thought it is a good cheap and easy idea. They will need no more operators in the control room...
Have you ever needed to use a company web page with a drop-down menu loaded with 2000 rows from database?
Have you ever wanted to search a work instruction of Symantec Enterprise Protection in your company documentation and had found all documents dated in September (SEP). Besides all other documents with more than two citation of SEP was more relevant than the work instruction.
Wow... Let this sink in for a minute: you managed to pair a contemporary Linux system with a piece of *90 years old* technology! 😮 Everyone who designed, built and used this almost antique device back in the day for its originally intended purpose, before it became obsolete, has almost certainly died of old age years ago. Yet this valuable relic from the past is still happily chugging along, as a monument to times long passed. I'm glad to see it in such pristine and well-preserved condition as well. Those things were obviously built to last.
It's always amazing to see the old connected with the new. And in addition to being fun, projects like these are of immense historical importance as well! Splendid job. 😊
Yeah, Bill Gates has a lot to learn from him.
W10 updates and suddenly is incompatible with your 4 years old equipment.
These machines were designed for heavy duty usage.
some mechanical TT printer machines were still in use for ship-shore TOR (Telex Over Radio) traffic in about 1990, though many (most? certainly on shore stations) had been replaced by compter systems.
HEY!!! I'm not dead yet!! I feel happy! ROFLMAO
Believe it or not, I actually used some of the last iterations of that technology while I was in the military... including the old punch tape readers and everything... You definitely had to be very sure of what you were typing with no mistakes because, well, obviously it was nearly impossible to go back and correct errors!! LOL No autocorrect... no shortened words... everything done by hand... or else pre-loaded by making a long punch tape that you would load and sent out.
We used to have a test message that we would send out that went something like this...
"When I get home my alarm will go and my bed will go and I will have a grand time swigging beer and eating pizza!!!"
Very clever designing an interface to a "modern day" computer system!!! Pretty similar approach to what I might have done (If I still had access to an old teletype!)
I worked for Teletype Corporation. I'm old.
Most mindblowing moment at 3:26 - who else happens to have a 4U sized Serial Data Generator lying around?!
Neo: "You could hack the Matrix with a teletype"
Tank: "Sure, pure bone and flesh. We can do it!"
Neo: "Contact the keymaker to build a bigger keyboard."
This reminds me of a school friend who connected a Telex terminal to a Commodore PET in the late 1970s.
His father was working for the Austrian Postal Services (Österreichische Post), which had the authority over the telecom sector at that time. Via this channel, he could get a decommissioned Telex terminal (Fernschreiber). At that time, getting a printer was out of scope for a high school student. Also the computer was just lent from another colleague who was an early adopter of such things. My friend built a level shifter and wrote a driver (most likely in 6502 assembler via poking the code into memory from Basic) to use the teletype terminal as a printer. He then ran a disassembler on the PET and printed out the entire source code of the MS-Basic for analysis and self teaching.
In Europe, the Telex system ran with 50 Baud. With the start and stop bits, this gave a maximum speed of 6.67 characters per second. This means, a line with 80 characters would need 12 seconds to print. My friend did not have endless paper on a roll, so he printed on single A4 sheets. He programmed the system to pause after one sheet was printed until the paper was manually changed and printing was resumed. It took in the order of 5 minutes to print one page and he was occupied for several afternoons until he had the full listing of the MS Basic source code.
He then dug into it to understand how things worked. I remember how he found the routines for the trigonometric functions and how we discussed how this was implemented.
What a great story! That’s what I like about free software though: You can just look through the original code.
Now that is a certified geek
So where's he now?
Try doing any of that with any code or drivers now a days
This is such an inspirational story!
*Stares at typewriter output for a second*
"Oh, I need sudo"
Some things never really change, do they?
I dunno... I think sudo didn't exist when I last invoked getty. ;)
@@DavidLindes Did you use su directly? Or did you log out and log in as root?
@@waldolemmer I used to use su directly, usually, but it depended on the details of the circumstance.
And I think it was somewhere in between in the chronology that ssh root@localhost became a sort of in-between... with authorized keys, I could avoid needing the root password for that, but it was still logging in as root, instead of just using sudo.
Typewriter and sudo - a very unlikely combination ;)
But the term "tty" for the virtual terminals in Linux comes from these teletypes, so it may be possible in a way not really mentioned in this video...
Did you know that already? I think yes...
@@Lampe2020 I certainly did. And pty (which you'll also see in some contexts) is pseudo-teletype. :)
Thanks to this video I finally understood what is intended by a 'terminal' in linux. I understood why a tty we open with ctrl + alt + F1 - F9 is called a virtual terminal. It is 'virtual' because it is not an electro-mechanical, big piece of iron, typing machine ('teletypewriter' or shortly 'tty'), as in the early days of Unix. And it is a 'terminal' because, despite so many years having passed, it still serves the same purpose: send a command to the OS as a string and show up the response from the OS, also in the form of strings. I appreciate your effort and curiosity. Thank you very much!
and in most cases it's a terminal emulator, not even an actual terminal.
But that also clears up for me the meaning behind putty
@@HappyBeezerStudios
Plutonium teletype. Obvs
Having been practically exclusively with Unix machines since mid 80-s, it is not even clear for me how else would you call the window where you interact with shell ?
@@dmitripogosian5084 the black window
@@dmitripogosian5084 the void
Amazing! I thought I was the only one crazy enough to do this.
Back in the late 60 s I put together a ham teletype station. It predated home computers. So when I got my Commodore Pet computer in 1977, I decided to use that model 15 as my printer. After a winter of effort, I devised a very good solution. With a simple handshake interface, and using the 2nd cassette buffer memory I came up with a machine language program that would read an ASCII character output on the IEEE port (by reading memory) it would convert it to 5 bit baudot and send it serially out a user port bit which keyed the teletypes current loop. For the pets special cursor movement characters it printed 2letter abbreviations like HC for home cursor. It also handled the upper/lower case shift issue correctly as well as printing return before line feed so that the print head had more time to get to home position before having to print another character. It was a difficult project since I had only 288 bytes of space and I had to hand assemble it since I had no assembler.
I still have that pet computer and the software. I passed on the teletype years ago. It would be cool to resurrect that setup if I could only find a baudot teletype. Congratulations on your efforts to keep that old teletype going!
The restoration project was impressive enough but to interface it to modern hardware is some next level insanity. I still have friends who struggle to interface a USB dongle to a USB port lol.
My first home computer used a 4N28 optocoupler to convert serial 5v ttl to a current loop that drove a Model 28 teletype. 60 wpm in all caps. I worked on mainframe terminals during the day with line driver modems for thousands of feet of data circuits on twisted pair. Been there
I mean, to be fair, don't we all struggle to interface USB dongle to USB ports? Assuming USB-A ofc, as well as USB-C if it's in the dark.
It's Linux, why wouldn't there be a way to connect a teletype
USB-A I usually get it to go in on the third or fouth attempt
@@HappyBeezerStudios Because the linux devs some time decided to remove the all-caps login possibility. UCASE, LCASE and XCASE was removed from the tty driver some time between 2.0 and 2.6 kernels I think.
"Those guys deserve a medal."
So true, and fortunately they got them! The National Medal of Technology, the Hamming Medal, and a variety of other awards that weren't technically medals. ;-)
I have a degree in computer science and a job as a programmer.
Sometimes I forget how goddamn easy we have it nowadays.
I do a little bit on arduino/linux...I am visiting my grandfather who was one of the original teletype operators, and this project gave us a lot to talk about and helped me learn about his work.
Thank you so much for sharing this incredible project!
Gears: exist
Linux: It’s free processing power
I'm pretty sure you can get firefox running on that machine
In Linux, everything is a gear.
@@robertmolnar You can run mosh.
@@robertmolnar Oh my. That would be some next-level page loading time there.
Me: I only have 8gb RAM
He: a giant memory of 2 kb
Imagine how long it would take to print out 8 GB of RAM
@@TheSuckerOfTheWorld lol
2 kilobits is actually just 250B. You can code in a tweet in it.
He actually said 2 kbits, not kbytes. And for a serial machine that sends bits, 2000 of them is pretty big actually
Never heard of swap?
Linux running an old teletype...One of the best projects I've seen yet. This is fantastic!
The first microprocessor I ever built was in June 1978, the CPU was a Signetics 2650 8-bit CPU and it was an Electronics Australia project, the 'computer' had a 20ma current loop and the 'operating system' used Baudot code (5-bit RTTY with a start and a stop bit). That talked to a teleprinter, just like this.
Some time back in the mid 1980's when I just started "fooling around" with computerstuff, I had written a computer program that took care of some accounting tasks at home & on my job. It wasn't anything too groundbreaking, but I had put a lot of my time, & effort into it, and wanted to made sure I had a good back-up . But I'd had some bad luck with archiving programs on the magnetic tape drives & media of the day. However, I did have a fully functioning, 1970's era ASR 33 Teletype at home, which includes a paper tape punch and reader as part of its' assembly. So, to back up my program, I dumped it to the punch tape. It took almost a full roll, but it was the best option for me at the time. For a time, I also used to back up some important (to me) data on to punch tape, and I still even have one roll which was a back up of one of my early phone & e-mail contact lists. (Although alotta the people on it are dead now!) Once, I was interrupted by a phone call while emptying the plastic receptacle which held all the 'chad' from the paper punches and I set it down near the edge of a desk, where the cat knocked it over. Geez, I was finding those little yellow paper dots all over the house for the next 3 months or so. The cat got covered with them too & I had a polka-dotted puss till I was able to brush him off. I wish I had taken a picture.
OMG YES!!! I used to get bags full of those at "work" (military) and I would save the stupid things for prank confetti!!! Talk about "yellow snow" out of a third floor window! ROFLMAO
I would totally use this with a Twitter client. Live printed updates coming from your favorite Twitter account. Its so loud you wouldn't miss a single tweet!
jemimus Tweepy on python... done
It would be hilarious if you hooked up Trump's Twitter account to this. Especially for me since I live in Europe and he posts when it's night for me. So if I hear this thing going off in the middle of the night I know I'm in for a surprise
THIS!!! This is the answer to what a 500 pound Canary sounds like!!! Twittertype!!
Awesome video (and machine)!
PS: I love how a bunch of my favorite channels always dub Mehdi's voice whenever they mention Full Bridge Rectifiers.
Takes me back to my DJ'ing gig, where I doubled as the news reader. I sat at the teletype terminals and read the AP news releases as they came through. That sound was adopted by many networks to announce an "incoming bulletin".
That absolutely needs to run Zork, I'd love to see it slowly print out "you have been eaten by a grue"!
If only it had a few more characters, I'd have to see net hack...
Yes, this would be perfect for it.
Zork would be awesome on this. I first played Zork when I was a kid on a DEC PDP 11/40 with a teletype as the terminal at the local university. It was translated into Fortran if I remember right. I still have the printout of my session somewhere..
Yeah! I kept waiting thinking that Zork would be next, but sadly not. That said Infocom's "The Witness", or maybe "Bureaucracy" might be better thematic fit for this machine!
LOL... How about "All your base are belong to us..." ?!?
Lol imagine using this during the war and the enemy cracks your code only to find ASCII art being sent over the wire.
the book Cyrptonomica, also Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Lol, the germans would have spent all WW2 trying to figure out the meaning of PePe
"This new enemy code in completely indecipherable!... Oh wait... no, my mistake, it's just an unencrypted Perl script"
@@joeexotic7430 Hitler: "What is '8======D lmao' supposed to mean anyway?!"
@@superscatboy = isn‘t available on the keyboard
Amazing to think that they were still basically relying on these types of terminals even in the 70's.
This was GREAT! Something I've thought about and imagined for years...connecting a modern computer to a mechanical teletype machine. Thanks for the video, it is great.
Dam, so this is how our ancestors watched TH-cam.
Waiting for a woosh
@@norths9 still waiting*
r/woooosh
@@whooshifgay gay
frames per second.... nah... minutes per frame
When I first used a government computer system in the 70s, we still used punch tape. The women in the terminal room (men weren't allowed to operate the machines) punched all the data on baudot paper tape, and then sent them to the mainframe about 300 miles away over a standard dedicated telephone line. The return link was via the postal service, on printed cards and paper.
@@ray32245mv let me guess -- you're a white man. Gee, I wonder why YOU of all people liked it "the old way"? And why women and non-white people didn't? Hmmm... think REALLY hard about it, you'll figure it out.
Holy crap, you eejits are turning an anecdote under a video about a teletype system into a bloody political argument. Go outside and stop watching Jordan Peterson, Russel Brand, or whatever pseudointellectual everyone loves jerking each other off to these days.
It is a marvel how much hardware has advanced, and we still pretty much use some form of Unix all these years later whether it is Linux, BSD, of even MacOS
@@TaxEvasionUS Solaris still exists, even if it's in its death throes.
@@zorkmid1083 Hey! We have Illumos now that's built on solaris, plenty of distros around but Omnios is the one I use.
Very clever use of the speaker terminals for the resistors! Congratulations on 100k! Happy 2021 everybody!
Sep 2022: That machine has such a distinct sound used by many media outlets in the US in the 60s and 70s, usually background sound effect during news breaks. Wonderful!
FBI: you wouldn't download a car
CuriousMarc: can't hear you, printing out the Saturn V
Linda want a copy of that, not gunna lie
FBI: you wouldn't download a car
People with advanced 3D printers 20 years from now: watch me bitch
where did the "you wouldn't download a car" phrase come from anyway? Cause I totally would if it were possible
@@easternplatypusis a joke from some people trying to download RAM memory
@@juanfelixdelapena3243wasn’t it an anti-piracy thing?
I really loved this, I always thought of paper teletypes in terms of 1970s computer hardware, I never considered that tty and baud were such historical entities.
I last logged in to a UNIX system on a real tty in the late 1988s. I was one of the first students using the graphical windowed terminals rather than crt terminals. So a real paper terminal was still a historical curiosity for us but useful for getting a quick print out.
One of our friends was on the tty and we mischievously cat’ed a file full of CTRL-G’s to his world writable tty device on the shared system we were all logged into. It was writable because the inter terminal program needed to be able to send a message to their tty to tell them that you wanted to chat. The CTRL-Gs sound as bells and made his terminal bell sound continuously for some time. I’ll never forget his response. “Please don’t do that again.... people are leaving the room thinking it is fire alarm.... “ lol sorry ROS...
Teletypers was used well into the 80-tys. Early computers worked this way. They simply connected the. To teletypers, because that was what was avalible.
There even was some back in 1880-tys. Fully mechanical computers with a electromagnetic teletypers.
And to think he could have used:
`while true; do echo "🔔"; done`
replace the bell emoji with whatever input you need to get a ctrl+g in the file; in vi/vim it's ctrl+v, ctrl+g; I don't know what it is in the OS that lacks a functioning text editor.
@@BrianRyans we did do that sometimes with a random delay between bells…
I used to repair teletype machines in the RAF back in the 60s,/70s great to see one actually working again.
My first time seeing this channel. I’m blown away great work! I’m really inspired to pursue more of what I love like you’re doing.
WOW, it's 1972 again and I am at Western Union, just hired right out of electronic school. Learning trouble shooting skills that served me and saved me in the passing years. Your leg-adapter would fit right in, any W&R (wire and repeater) cabinet, that Uncle Wes would have. It needs a couple of analog meters, 'gotta measure the TX & RX current in real time!
It was nice to see again the issues of speed & code differences again. We had 3 row TWX to 4 row TWX to deal with too. Thank God that nobody that I know of made a glass tty for BAUDOT. A baudot to 3270 box, is too Max Headroom too even think of.
When I graduated, in 1974, I went to work for Terminal Communications in Raleigh, NC. When I started, we were still maintaining the converted teletype machines for customers. But we were moving on to Intel 8008 (and, later, 8088) microprocessor based terminals, using IBM printball printers and video data terminals Thanks for the blast from the past.
You are very lucky old timer lived through golden age of technology. Nowadays everything piece of technology worthless, common tools to stream worldwide hate speech.
@@stareintoabyss you need to stay out of these communities!
Calling in on BBS services, maintaining the community! These principals still stand. If you fail that, it becomes toxic. That was then, and now the same!
Ed, man! !man ed - Ed is the standard text editor.
I literally could not smiling the entirety of this video! Thank you so much fo your hard work and effort! This was absolutely amazing!!!!
Seems like this should’ve been used in a Star Trek episode.
Spock and Kirk are stranded in 1930 and Spock cobbles together a communication link through a wormhole to a 1960s computer through a teletype.
The computer links to the Enterprise through the nascent ARPANET via ALOHAnet wireless transmission protocol and the world avoids global pandemic in 2020.
your imagination is gold ,dude !!!!!!!!!
You'll need to hook it up to a Flux capacitor to do that. Question is, do you need one of both ends? Then again can quantum entangled bits link across time?
...and lo-and-behold an ice cold Corona beer materialises out of a worm hole and Kirk notes that Vulcans don't drink beer :P
You forgot the bit where they route it through the spark gap transmitter in Curious Marc's lab.
@@gcewing Spark Gap transmitters were obsolete long before 1927, and essentially made illegal in that year. But there is another possibility for a story plot: Use an Alexanderson alternator transmitter.
There is still one working Alexanderson alternator transmitter which is used to transmit CW on Alexanderson day (the closest Sunday to 2nd July), at Grimeton in Sweden, on 17.2kHz, and sometimes on 24th December. It is a World Heritage site, and worth reading about on Wikipedia. Search for 'Alexanderson Alternator' and 'Grimeton Radio Station'.
That type of transmitter was patented very early in the 20th Century, and they were still used daily during the Second World War. Some were in regular use until 1960.
"Looks like something happened at exactly midnight - could you pull up the system logs from then?"
"Sure thing, 3rd filing cabinet on the right."
I just love the thought of an alternate universe where computing kept going but modern displays were never developed. Supercomputers outputting on something like this
Marc, this is the coolest project i have seen for a long time :)
Lovin it
"Aah, I have to do sudo."
^Linux in a nutshell
Along with "Aah, turns out something broke and I can either spend a week fixing it or reinstall"
@@RyanTosh the fix takes seconds maybe minutes, its just the googeling if you dont know what the error is/how to solve it
@Jhon Krasnovskiy I'm just joking :p
@@user-hx7dc9uz6s No need to be rude, I'm just making a joke :p
@Jhon Krasnovskiy most linux distros are extremely user friendly, it's just the lack of open sourcing in compatibility layers, and because of the mentioned sentiment, there's less support for linux
"Join me next time, as we attempt to build a programmable SOC using a handful of sand and some copper wire scraps."
That sounds like something the professor could do on Gilligan's Island.
Tails is that you?
/usr/bin/macgyver
@@JohnGardnerAlhadis Except it's all ducktape and chewing gum.
@@Megalomaniakaal My bad.
/usr/bin/macgyver --tools='duct-tape gum' || { echo >&2 "Failed to connect to the 21st century"; exit 20; }
Aight, you got my subscription with this one. Very well done. Wish I had the equipment to play with this stuff. Working on it! So cool. thanks for the inspiration!
This is great. I started in high school on a PDP-8L with an ASR-33. Programmed in BASIC with line numbers. Brings back memories.
Just imagine an office full of these. You'd need hearing protection, but it would be so cool!
Makes me think of the scene in Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory. They are in The newsroom and all the teletypes are going...
Full Bridge Rectifier ... LOVE IT :D
you mean "fooool breeech rectifiaaa" :-)
In case of Electroboom, it is usually a full bridge recti FIRE! :D
Not a puny half wave rectifier
A more wonderful demonstration of electrical signals and digital translation could not be found! Every aspiring digital engineer should watch this!
That was just about the cooles thing I have seen on youtube! I wish more people would gain the depth of knowledge about how their computers actually work, like you have.
This is amazing in many ways. Of course the "full bridge rectifier" part is hilarious. I'm a long time Linux user but this really gives me an idea of what it was like in the old days. E.g. why commands and the output from them is so terse. Why "ed" is so infuriatingly spartan with it's feedback (and why would it work in the line-by-line fashion it does). I understood the general idea of teletypes but seeing it in operation is much cooler. Your interface circuit is neatly designed and built. Finally I like that HP serial stream generator. I imagine back in it's time that would be a real handy tool. Thanks Marc!
?
:^)
(I guess nowadays the _-v_ option helps a bit, but yeah, that would've been way too much to print on a TTY)
"Full Bridge Rectifier!" - ElectroBOOM.
Next Video: "How's it going guys, today I'm installing Arch Linux on this 90 year old computer"
i once installed linux on a clay pot
@@BrandonGinn X to doubt
ASCII art was my introduction to computers (at a 1968 open house at the U. of B.C.) Love that you pulled this off!
Apple: Your 2019 i(whatever) charger is too old for this 2020 i(whatever) device. Not charging.
Linux: 1930 teletype? No probs.
You can in a pinch power your modern device off the signal lead to your 1930s device ;)
This demonstration really drivers the point of standards home (although some conversion circuitry was needed). Edit: I guess the same goes with keyboards, too: DIN-5 > PS/2 > USB.
Funnily enough I find Apple has pretty decent support for *really* old hardware. My Mac with the latest version of macOS can still sync with a 1st gen firewire iPod! (Also worth mentioning macOS should have no problem running a shell on a serial device, it is a true UNIX OS after all!)
@@seshpenguin There was someone on TH-cam that was able to get an old 20MB Mac hard disk to appear on his iPhone with only a modest amount of work.
That this post has gotten as many likes, and an author like even, is a travesty.
Apple is about the best there is among modern consumer hardware makers with having extensive BC.
Perfect? No. Could be substantially improved? Sure.
But they are still vastly better than just about anyone else.
I’ve always laughed at sending text messages by smartphone. All that computer power and you send what is nearly Morse code.
This teletype connected to PC is like installing autopilot in a Wright Flyer.
I love it.
The Wright Flyer was if i'm not mistaken not stable aerodynamically so yes an autopilot would also need to be something along the fbw computer in F-16 (not as potent as in the Gripen.)
the difference in compute power is kind of self evident by the kinds of processors in the very first phones to support SMS, no? of course, I still appreciate that I can text someone with a phone from 1998 and they'll properly receive it.
Why utilize more computing power if you can utilize less? I don't get the first part of your comment at all. So we should waste processing resources to show our technological supremacy over the past? Doesn't make much sense.
If anything, this increased computing power lets software developers to get away with bloat and inefficiency.
@@KartonRealista2 indeed - many webpages have hundreds or even thousands of megabytes of JavaScript code just to ultimately show you some text... lots of it spent reimplementing basic things like text boxes on comment forms! (Never mind all the ad-tracking stuff.) Extremely wasteful to bandwidth and CPU cycles, and therefore wasting our phones' batteries.
@@KartonRealista2 couldn't agree more. Some of us work so hard to make every single Joule spent worth it, and then some "web developers" just throw everything out of the window. That's why I hate when I hear someone say "yeah don't worry, this is probably not the best solution but it works, so it's fine"
I'm not generally a jealous lizard, but I'm green with envy (more green than normal) at your being able to use Ed on a teletype ... This would be a dream come true + I love that there are hero-level nerds like you out there doing this :}
Loved it! thank you for sharing this, it's a think of beauty
That sure brings back memories of the old 110 Baud thermal printer with acoustic coupler my dad brought home from his Bell Labs days. I started my education as Unix System admin with that. I do love the sound that the Teletype makes. A fantastic video, with a well conceived and built interface.
ed wasn’t even the most ancient thing being used! And the ascii art was a super nice touch. Srs, this video is astonishing, brilliant, and beautiful. _thank you!_
Thanks!
300th like
This is a dream of mine. Ancient terminals logging to obscenely powerful (relatively) new hardware.
This is fantastic! What a joy to work on a project like this. Great job!
god this is beautiful, I need to get a teletype and do this to assert dominance on my coworkers
I threatened to bring a manual typewriter in to the office and caused a revolt (from those who were old enough to remember the sounds). The kids under age 50 were not sure what to make of my idea.
@@buenaventuralife
kids under 50
that's funny
I used to own an old paper-tape punch + reader that was good for that.
@@buenaventuralife Reminds me of a small German party bringing typewriters to a local parliament after laptops got banned there. It was back in 2012, the year before Merkel called the internet "uncharted waters"...
*dominance must be asserted*
Baudot-art - when you don't want any of that newfangled ASCII rubbish...
Karl Adams And of course “Baudot” sounds way more artsy than “ASCII” any day ;)
Yes, and there were other codings before ASCII. That's why languages like Algol 68 and APL had so many useful characters. ASCII becoming a standard for the new 8-bit micro computers in the 70s and 80s threw us back in time by thirty years, quite unnecessarily. With a little amount of work, we could have had larger or more customable character sets even on small computers, at least from the late 70s and onwards.
I mean, ASCII had no actual multiplication sign, no actual division sign, no "less or equal" or "greater or equal", no set operators, no arrows, no Greek letters, no European letters, no accents, ... Even though Unicode with its roots in the 1960s (!) and UTF-8 has been a de facto standard since early 2000s, we still suffer from this spartan character set they called ASCII.
Man thats insane. Great ... congratulations, I never imagine thats will be possible. Thanks for your work !!
Here I 2022. OMG what is this witchcraft you have carried out! That is absolutely amazing. I’m an EE major and don’t quite understand how it all works. Really cool. Thank you for making this video.
iOS/Windows: This monitor is no longer supported, try a newer model...
Linux: *Hold my beer*
What the fuck. I can't agree more with Apple, but Microsoft supports their products and legacy for decades.
@@kolskytraveller1369 I think with Mac OS it should work pretty similar, because it’s Unix-based too. Under Windows this will probably be a lot harder.
My maudio delta44 sound card stopped working ni windows XP sometime. Plugged it into my i5 linux box last month and "just worked"
@@grossteilfahrer That's totally different from a monitor, concerning driver compability, since any monitor works as long as you have the cable and adapters, both on Linux, Windows and even Mac (I think). And also for any strange output methods, Linux is thought for a wide variety of devices. Windows 10 is a OS for a graphical user interface. Windows is for ease of use in normal day to day activities, while different Linux distros cover everything from microwaves to supercomputers.
@@EragoEntertainment Yes but windows intentionally obsoleted the fine functioning hardware by not updating the driver.
If aliens invaded, you'd be invaluable to the resistance.
It is impervious to EMP
@@darylcheshire1618 That's exactly why I want a mineograph (a model from around the sixiesish).
This takes me back! my father had one of these teletypes as a printer on a Signetics 2650 computer in 1978.
Very impressive video. I love such kind of integration: vintage gear with tech gear.
Thank you!
A mechanical marvel with hundreds of springs, levers, nuts, bolts and whatnot.
This may be the most hacked together thing I've seen in a good while... and I love it.
C'est absolument génial d'avoir réussi à connecter une machine de 1930 sur un ordinateur de notre époque tournant sur Linux. Passionnant et brillant. Bravo ! 😃
That subscribe message was so well placed. And youknow it kinda did it's work too. i noticed i haven't subscribed yet. Been watching your videos for a while now so might as well.
most steampunks just settle for putting typewriter buttons on their keyboard, marc gets a teletype to be his keyboard
If it were steampunk, it would run on steam… ^^)
Yea, all he needs now is a fancy mahogany and brass case with some pressure gages set to 45.5 baud.
@@Eo_Tunun Well theoretically..... minus the actual transmit, it can run on steam. It is fully mechanical. The decoder wheels etc. are run by electric motor run shaft. As I remember a constantly running one (not that it matters, just put in a clutch, if one needs intermitten rotating of the main shaft). So just swap the electric motor for steam engine or turbine with a suitable governor to make sure it runs at right RPM...... You have steam powered teletype.
The extend of electronic components is the decoding electromagnet and the rotating electronic contacts formed on the encoding rotor to send messages.
Yeah but these are Dieselpunk Era
@@Eo_Tunun steampunk uses electricity they have typewriters and stuff, it just has to glow and spark and be run by steam generators
10:47 “Ahhh I have to do sudo”
Same. I lost account of how many times I just forgot to use sudo.
every time
Great demo! And great Electroboom reference :) made my night
What a beautiful machine!
It took me back to my early days (1971+) of computing with Flexowriters and ASR33 Teletypes, but by then we were using this new-fangled ASCII with 7 bit characters!
Done some current loop hardware hackery too...
I was writing low level code for serial ports less than ten years ago, though - some things don't change much.
ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! 🤣
Until ATT Unix System V, they port vi
Finally a real /dev/tty!
That is awesome man. Great work!
This is soooo beautiful. Well done, my friend. Well done indeed.
I’m always blown away when I see an amazing project like this that took so much work, and the end result is something that is hardly satisfying even for a few minutes.
Baudot terminals were still being used into the 1980's! I remember a pair of receive-only terminals at my college radio station connected to a UPI news feed which we would read to do the news each day. Both were on the same feed so they printed the same news. One was an old clunker like the one that Marc restored, but without a keyboard. The other was much smaller quieter and more modern. Nevertheless, I preferred the older one because it had fully formed characters that were easier to read than the dot matrix print of the newer terminal.
I believe they were also used for weather-service reports until fairly recently.
That is pretty damn awesome, hats off to the inventor of the teletyper.
Awesome project! Congratulations!!
This video was exactly what I needed right now to calm down, having trouble to sleep. I really like the old Teletype machines 😊
same here, until *FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER*
Me too, i like it
me 2 i want
"we need a 5 bit signal" 😄
FANTASTIC video!!! well done man!! made my day lol