I want to say I really respect your appreciation for machine shop safety concerns. Many people don't think about the fact that actually having a clear head while you're working is just as important as (or even more important than) all of the other safety measures everybody always tends to talk about. I once had a coworker (a tech job, nothing shop related) who was on some pain medication for an unrelated issue, but was still able to fully move around and do stuff just fine. One day after work he decided to go out to his wood shop to do some hobby woodworking, and came back to work several days later getting to explain to everyone why he was suddenly missing two fingers, because it turns out because of the medication his head _wasn't_ quite clear enough to avoid making a dumb mistake that he would now get to live with for the rest of his life. This stuff is not a joke. Never mess around with power tools if you don't feel absolutely 100%. It may seem like just a "stuffy head", but it can easily still be the difference between deciding to do something right or very very wrong at a critical moment.
You couldn't be more right. I didn't drive for more than ten years because medication for a physical health issue was messing up my concentration. That was eventually changed, and my alertness improved considerably. But I still only drive when I know I'm feeling good.
"What did you do at work this week?" "On Monday i started a directory listing which finished on Wednesday. Then i had to do it again, this time with the printer turned on, which took me to Friday afternoon..." 300 Baud, baby!
Oh man what a flashback! Many many years ago (probably around 1985) my dad brought one of these home from his job in silicon valley... and because it had a modem that meant I could head into the wild world of BBSes. I am sure I was pissing off every SYSOP connecting at 300 baud and hogging the lines but it was amazing!
Or me using my C64 and a 300 baud modem. I know well the joys of a 40 column display connecting to an 80 column machine. Though, to be fair, when connecting to a C64 aware server, the petsci graphics were awesome. Later I did upgrade to a 1200 baud.
@@no1DdC In my they were all Atari-only (ATASCII), connected via an MPP-1000C modem at 300 baud. I remember a few of them being in SoCal (818) and I was dialing in from NYC (212), using dubious AT&T long distance codes we got from a wardialer
@@no1DdC Yup. Forums, warez, teleconference chat, games. My Apple //e had 80 columns so i didnt have to deal with 40 column most of the time. Apple bbs' could use ProTERM Special Emulation to get a semi graphical output which could also be used for gui menus and windows using mousetext. Later i used my apple to connect to a unix shell where i could chat on irc, access files via ftp, archie and telnet to play muds or chat
I kind of was hoping that this one would have an amber phosphor, but the white phosphor still looks really good. I'm already feeling tons better, I should be right as rain in a few days!
Yeah. I think when I first encountered those as a child in the late 90s they were kinda on their way out. The county public library system used Dynix for searching the catalog and managing borrowed materials. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software) But it's very nostalgic in some ways and was very much a hallmark of a time before the internet/WWW.
When your previous interaction with the computer was through punch cards, 300 baud dial-up was GLORIOUS! Guy needs a landline and then set up a BBS for us to hack into.
That 300 BAUD really brings back memories, my first MODEM was 300 BAUD and I thought it was absolutely magical. I skipped 1200 BAUD and went to 2400 BAUD later and thought that was absolute lighting.
My first modem was 300 baud, too. I used it to get on an IBM computer at my college in the 1980s, so I could write and run my Pascal language class assignments. When I was done with the assignment, I entered a command that caused my assignment to print on a high-speed line printer, where it would be retrieved and graded by a teaching assistant. My class was the last to use that computer.
Yeah, same here. I had a neighbor with a 300 BAUD acoustic coupler (TRS, I'm pretty sure) that he decided he had no use for, and gave it to me. I didn't get a Hayes internal modem until a few years and a new computer later.
@@UsagiElectric My limited experiance of double charactors on the screen was the result of the computer you were connected to sending the data back as to show a good connection and "echo on" being an option for when the computer did not echo the charactor back.
I do love your honesty. I made the mistake many years ago whilst on flu meds, I chose to use a band saw and nearly took my thumb off. Never again. I agree this one is cute.I know I should write a comment at the end but just wanted to jump in. Really enjoying your channel. Thank you. It’s a bit of reminiscing but also it’s what our technology was built on and you can’t ignore it. All the best from the UK.
It’s amazing how far computers have come in the last 50 years. What a clean example of a little data terminal. I graduated in the mid nineties and used computers quite a bit, started off in middle school with the Apple IIE system and went from there. We had an early DOS computer at home and I remember how huge of a jump it was to go to windows 3.1. Thanks for the video. Hopefully you are feeling better. Can’t wait to see the Bendix up and running.
The TMS1000 also was the brain of my first computer game, a Merlin! Much, much later I was amazed, that my cute game was using the first (or one of the first?) microcontrollers that existed! (And it was born the same year as I was! :D)
In the late 1970s, 300 baud (30 characters per second) was considered "high speed" as compared to 110 baud (10 CPS). This reminds me of what I might have been doing with my Apple ll with a DC Hayes modem - also 80x24, upper case only. Anyone remember The Source, which lost out to CompuuServe? How much did those things cost at the time? Isn't that keyboard too small to type on comfortably? Enough power to run a CRT over a DB9 connector? Is that dangerous? Get well soon!
CRTs use high voltages, but they don't use much current. As long as the cable is well-enough insulated for a couple kilovolts, the RJ-style plug is fine.
@@McTroyd Didn't look like the base had any HV stuff on it. No flyback or anything. But a CRT that small, and B&W only, didn't need much current, you are correct there. But i bet the HV is all in the "monitor" itself. But 12 or 24Vdc over the RJ would have been doable easily, and not too much current for that type of cable.
@@McTroyd Not claiming i am correct, we'd need to see inside the monitor to really know. Just my gut call based on not seeing any obvious HV generating circuitry or components in the base chasis. I am more than willing to admit i might be wrong here. We really need to see more tear down or circuit diagrams.
16:10 When the terminal scrolls, a copy of the top line that scrolled off flickers at the bottom briefly. I guess it has exactly enough RAM to hold the whole screen (960 cells), and uses some kind of address offsetting to do the scrolling (e.g. by changing what value a counter starts at in the renderer), so it can rotate the top rows to the bottom and then clear them. The rendering would have to be faster than the clearing to produce that glitch.
That looks like what you'd see in a comic as a 70's computer. It's right up there with the Commodore Pet. Decades ago, I had a little Tektronix data terminal connected to a PC running Linux that I had set up as a router, mail server, and a few other functions for those of us sharing a two bedroom apartment. A company a friend was working for was dumping a bunch of them and he offered me one. It worked perfectly for the task and when not needed, I simply stored it on a shelf in the closet. I wish I still had it.
Ya want another one? Ours worked okay, than got silly. Never tried to troubleshoot, but never threw it out. Figured it was PMOS depletion-mode rot. Considered fleabay, but sending it to you sounds more useful, especially if it serves as a parts donor down the line. YT will notify me if you reply. Love your stuff. Ciao!
I did my grad work in Chemistry, and the department's library had a TI Silent 700 series terminal to access journal databases. How I wish they had this. And I just loved those clacky keyboards.
Well... I never thought I'd say this about a data terminal... but I agree with you it _IS_ cute, and it brings back some nostalgia for me from my days at college in the early 80's. I remember working on my homework assignments on data terminals in the computer lab in college, they were the larger 80 Column like the ADD's and Hazeltine and they were connected to the DEC-10 at 300 Baud for the students. Then one day I saw the "Special terminal" in a closet that is reserved for use by faculty, it was running it at 9600, that was a real WOW moment for me! But as we know, the technology improved and speeds ramped up quickly, the data communications got better, and the infrastructure improved; Today we have amazing high-speed connections that we take for granted, but it had humble beginnings and it had to start from somewhere.
I wonder if you could log into basic ASCII BBSes with that. You can still dial into them today. I’ve done so with my USR Courier recently, actually. You may be able to set up a VoIP with an analog adapter…
If you really want to run it over a "phone line" without having an actual phone line, pick up a Hayes 1200/300 modem, configure it for auto-answer mode, and pick up a used phone line simulator for under $50.
That's a lovely thing. When I first saw it I thought 'wow, a TI SilentType but with a VDU' and that's exactly what it is. To a point, anyway. Get well soon Dave.
This little terminals big brother, the DS990 Model 1, watched this from across the room 😁 TI had some amazing products back in the 70s and 80s. What a wild time it was! Get well soon!!
Very interesting, and cute, terminal. That's a cool bit of kit. I think you were confusing duplex with local echo though. Duplex is the ability to send and receive data at the same time, or not. (half being you can only send or receive at any moment, full means you can do both at the same time). Echo on the other hand is simply copying what you send to the local display as you send it. (so no-echo would rely on the host to send back what it receives from you so you can see it)
Indeed, I remember getting a printout of local BBS's that had all the phone numbers, that included what stop bits, baud rate, parity, and local echo or not etc. You knew you had local echo setup wrong when everything you typed ddoouubblleedd uupp
I went down a rabbit hole with a TRS-80 PT-210 data terminal... created a RS-232 expansion card replica for it (& posted on eBay), and retrofit its ROM (& posted the ROM mod) to support sending & printing lowercase characters as well (that involved reverse-engineering its font and creating/adding font bitmaps!). It's a thermal-printer terminal that prints on commodity fax-paper rolls (walked in and picked up a roll at Staples that works great), and... it, too, is a 300-baud terminal. It's a bit of a wild ride hooking it up to a modern *nix system and interacting with it - in fact, at work, I tunneled through my laptop and connected to a modern embedded system through Telnet. Can confirm, 300 baud is of limited utility and involves gobs of patience, but moreso is the lack of control-character support. No backspace, no line movement, nothing except a stream of characters. A lot of improvement has been made since then, but it's sure got its charm!
I remember the PT-210 thread on VCfed forums from last year or so. I was impressed with how most of its limitations were entirely in software. It literally came down to not quite having enough keyboard keys to tell it to do enough things. Yes, even the printer font was in the main micro-controller, with room for lowercase! It's more brilliant than you would expect if you hadn't seen the insides of the design.
Nice! Agreed, it's a very well thought out design and construction. Was also cool to see the somewhat related TI-99 "toys" you have, including the acoustic coupler :) Get well soon, man! 👍
I'm sorry to hear that you've been under the weather, but awww, what an adorable video to make while you're convalescing! I had hoped to head out to VCF Midwest today to take in the show and meet some of my favorite TH-camrs in person (and I had hoped that would include you), but, alas, we're dealing with a li'l COVID this week at my house, so I decided the best thing to do for my fellow vintage computing fans is to sit this one out. 😓I live in the Chicago area, so maybe next year. Anyway, here's wishing you a speedy and complete recovery so you can get back to that G15 and Hawk drive and all the other cool content you have in your pipeline.
This thing would have been a budget hacker's dream in the late 70s/early 80s especially with that command module holding preloaded instructions. Not to mention being goddam adorable!
What a beautiful machine! And a great video explaining it. (First time I saw a TMS1000 was in the MB Computer Battleships game I took apart as a kiddie, running the game and controlling a SN76477 sound IC.)
@ 11:40 - should be relatively easy to trace the pin-out of the edge connector, design a memory board, and 3D print a case for it 😄 Spent several years on the bench programming TMS1000 based devices for telephony (intelligent office phones, small telephone exchanges) at GEC in the yUK. The chips really were designed for I/O, ideally suited for keyboards, buttons, 7-seg LED displays, all sorts of things. My all-time fave with a 1000 was a 76-nibble program to control the function buttons and status LEDs of a telephone: now THAT was programming... 🤓👍
16:26 interesting how it flashes something (part of the line above?) in the lower right when the screen scrolls. Wonder if there's some sort of software bug or if it's intended to work that way?
Another comment theorized that it's a circular buffer with a race condition (or just a tad sloppy code). That means there would simply be a "top of screen" address pointer, and a "cursor" address pointer, with display and writing functions continuously streaming to a block of memory and simply cycling back to the top when it reaches the bottom. Easy way to maintain a screen of text without having to copy/move blocks of data to elicit scrolling. I suspect this happens when the data consists of all wrapped lines, which happens a hellova lot more on a 40-column display mode than an 80. That causes it to miscalculate the top of screen, maybe, and ugly patches were done to make it display nicely. It's one thing to have a simple concept, another to have to tack additional checks and features into it (like wrapping which super screws with addressing and calculation of buffer position)! Considering this thing only had, what... a 1KB ROM? 😂 (Oh, and possibly a 2KB ROM in the one used as a display controller) Everything written in direct machine code. No libraries to build from, and probably just one guy writing it. haha
I can agree milling when you’re sick is not a good idea. I’ve done it cause we needed to finish some small parts for a DOD project and I ended up faulting the tool changer in the HAAS twice, Also not thinking straight while trying to tram a vice in and issuing an M19 orientation command to watch the indicator go flying into the chip pan not fun. Get well soon hope sharing my experience with this also reinforces why it’s a bad idea.
The article said that you could get it to show you a 40-column view of an 80-column screen... but I suppose that's something that the terminal would have to be set up to do. Maybe wih some kind of internal function. And without a manual or really anything other than the terminal itself, that might be difficult.
In the early 90s, I was working on a system that used dialup. Rather than get a bunch of phone lines from Bell, we had a box from radio shack that was a 4 line phone switch. The server was on a modem on port 1, so to connect we were dialing “ATD1 “ from any other port. Worked great until we ran out of ports. You need something like that for your server room. The ports were entirely analog so you could not use 57.6k modems, but anything slower would work great.
Modems will connect at slower modem to modem speeds and the RS232 ports will work at slower speeds. Because our modem issues were connecting to the computer side, we would lock the RS232 speed to the desired speed. If you considering getting a modem (do they still sell the things?) you should check the speeds they support. I may still have an old 300 baud one laying around here somewhere if I didn't get rid of it in the move.
BTW if you want your own phone system for fairly low amounts of money I can recommend you getting an ISDN PBX. Since analog telephony standards are virtually identical all over the world you could get it from Germany where they are really plentiful. You can even get something like a refurbished Fritz!Box 7490 which is an ADSL-WIFI-Router with DECT and 2 analog lines (no pulse dialing) and an internal ISDN S0 bus for something like 40 Euros. A larger modular ISDN PBX like a COMmander Basic 2 will set you back something like 50-200 Euros depending on the modules installed, but that can give you up to 32 analog ports, 8 ISDN ports, and one S2M 30 channel port.
Cute! And yes, you absolutely need a PBX setup! But simply for connecting two 300bps modems you can likely get away with just a wire between them. For slightly newer modems you would need a power source in series with them, like a tiny wall wart (regulated DC) or a 9V battery. Especially the older modems that don't do dialing and answering are "always online", I.E. there is no handshake/setup phase. A PBX would be cooler though. Either go with something old analogue, possible electromechanical, or go with one that is modern enough that it can also do IP Telephony. If you go with IP Telephony, consider connecting it to a modern (-ish) computer running Asterisk with the add-on that lets you connect it to modern smart phones via Bluetooth. The modern phone will consider Asterisk as a headset, allowing Asterisk to make and receive calls. That way you can use your old analogue POTS telephones to make and receive calls routed through your smartphone. With multiple bluetooth dongles to the Asterisk computer each family member can be connected, offering endless possibilities to have complicated setups just for the sake of it. Or for that sake take/make calls using an old phone worth almost nothing when you for example are working on greasy/dirty stuff in your garage or so.
3:44 - yeah, and already broken (crack in lower left corner). How I hate those keyboards. Had one of those on the PET, it got stuck and bent and cracked and it was the biggest crap ever designed.
I didn’t have a chance to watch Voyager when it was airing, work, school & family got in the way. Fast forward to the great binge-watch of 2020 and I finally got to see it. Gotta say, Janeway is up there with my fav captains now.
The kitties were thinking.. hey I knew there's a cute little baby bunny around here SOMEwhere! I am SURE of it.. let me poke around here and there.. : )
Hi. That terminal is really cute. :) Another great video. A big thank you and wish you get back to 100% soon. One note, you are using the expressions "half-duplex" and "ful-duplex" in a wrong way. That feature controled by the switch in the back of the terminal, is called "Local Echo". When ON any typed character is echoed to the screen locally; When Off you only see on the screen whatever the remote host sends. When you are getting double characters means the the "Local Echo" is ON and the software on the remote host is echoing back what it receives. This feature is still available on the terminal emulator applications like "putty", "GTKterm", "Minicom",..... Back in the day remote terminals were used in "transational mode" instead of interactive. In this mode the application fills the screen with a mask (form), then the operator fills in the relevant fields on that screen with the terminal operating in local mode (no comms involved), in the end the whole data filled by the user was sent at once to the the host system, only the data, not the mask. Terminals of that era even have a special "transmit key" (XMIT or SEND) to send the data from the terminal memory. It think its that red key on the right. Operation in interactive mode, like we are used today, was undesirable due to the very slow communications available in those days. But..., in some applications, "transational operation" is still in use today; just take a look at how "HTML Forms" work. Full/Half duplex relates to the communication hardware, either it can send and receive simultaneously or not. For example, with a terminal directly connected to your Centurion by an RS-232 line you can have full duplex due to the separated TX and RX wires. But if you connect via a phone line and a pair of modems, than you are limited to half duplex because the phone line is a one way carrier. A modern example of "half-duplex" can be the I2C protocol, and for "full-duplex" we can think of the SPI protocol, both used in micro controller based electronics. Just another note, you seem to have stumbled in the great grand father of the F1...F12 keys on a modern PC keyboard. That "command module" with the pre recorded character sequences triggered by the "function" key..
An easy solution to the phone line issue is to get a PABX like the SOHO SP-208. They require zero setup and allow you to dial between 8 extension lines with analog phones and Modems. Much easier than setting up asterisk pbx.
Terminal must be using a circular buffer with a race condition for scrolling you get a flash of what was on top of the screen at the bottom before it clears it
At the time it was common to scroll the screen by changing the line start address, with the VDU scan hardware managing wrap from the last screen line address. With this scroll method there is no time when a slow CPU can clear the old (now off screen) line without it being seen. A faster CPU would aim to clear the line of screen memory in the horizontal blank interval.
I like how it has the aesthetic that survived into mid-80s Japanese MSX, but that cute little off-center CRT is incredible. And the way it mounts with a single RJ connector is brilliant! 3:45 pretty standard HiTek/Stackpole keys, very nice to type on. My first TRS-80 used them, and I did love it. They basically don't break unless you get in there and bend the little metal fingers. TMS-1000? Well, it's TI, so of course, but still, wow. That let them get the jump on this kind of design when everyone else was dependent on Motorola or Intel or even weirder mainstream CPUs that needed an actual address and data bus. EDIT: those keys don't break unless you break them, OR the plastic plunger splits its corners after decades of fatigue, something I've had to deal with in my ADM-3A terminal! At least I have spare junk keyboards from back in the day as donors.
I think Local Copy would send both uplink and downlink information to a local serial printer. It's why there are two DB-25s on the rear panel; one is for a printer or TTY.
Hope you feel better soon. Your video today was excellent, I love to see vintage equipment that is working. That's what my wife says when I'm working in my shop.
That idea of a home terminal gave me Minitel vibes. Minitel was a home terminal that was use in France from the early 80s - users could use it to look up phone number, book tickets etc.
@@IlBiggo they probably mentioned Minitel because it actually lasted until the early-00s in France, whereas all the other interactive Videotex(t) systems in other countries were always pretty niche (and expensive) so were quickly abandoned even by their few users.
WOW! Even though this item is a little outdated for my needs, it's impressive how well it is designed. I would use those (form factor) design concepts in current products. How everything is 99% tool less disassembly... I was facing a similar issue with a 24x8 LCD display, trying to figure out how to format data to fit correctly...
I know well the joys of connecting a 40 column display to an 80 column server at 300 baud. I was a teenager in the 80s with my C64 and my Might Mo 300 baud modem. Around 1990, I upgraded to a 1200 baud Commodore modem. So much blazing speed. But the nice thing about the C64 was when you connected to a server for a C64. The PETSCII graphics were awesome. 1200 baud was plenty fast for downloading software with everything being limited to 64k. Many games were limited to 16k which was even quicker to download.
Our local supermarkets used terminals similar to that one, years ago. One or two hardware trade stores still have them, albeit running a little faster than 300 baud; probably 9600 baud, judging by the screen data scrolling speeds. Those Texas devices seem to be almost bombproof. And, off-topic, I know of at least one person who was still running Windows 3.11 on an early Pentium for his small business, until he retired about 5 years ago. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
Telephone shenanigans: Find yourself a Teltone TLS Telephone Line Simulator. The TLS-3 (A or B models are preferred) will give you 2 lines, the TLS-4 or -5 will provide 4 lines.
Unexpected Marie Kondo reference! I literally brought down a bunch of clothes to Kondo-fold into an empty drawer while watching this, but that terminal was just too cool so I ended up not folding a thing...
I recall from an old video that your Centurion came with a modem to receive incoming connections? Or was that something else that multiplexed lots of terminals?
i used a draytec vigor 2800 adsl modem here in the UK - it had two analog phone ports on it and you can call the other port by dialing a number - so in a tiny box you have a standalone two extension analog phone system and you can play bbs with it
Imagine if modern laptops were made with that level of serviceability, now a days you have to take 10 screws and pray you don't break a plastic clip just to disconnect the battery or upgrade the memory and storage (that is if your laptop still has sockets installed for all that).
When you panned over to the speech synthesizer on the TI-99, I noticed the card slot on that is also called a Command Module. Do they use the same edge connection?
It's the WALL-E of terminals.
Right! So adorable!
I love it!
Came to say the exact same thing.
That thing needs urgently a bunch of servos, so that the CRT can look at and track you :)
no
*ominous musics from 2001: A Space Odyssey playing*
Absolutely!
But only occasionally, and only when the user isn't looking at it directly.
Johnny nr. 5
That would be both delightful and creepy!
I want to say I really respect your appreciation for machine shop safety concerns. Many people don't think about the fact that actually having a clear head while you're working is just as important as (or even more important than) all of the other safety measures everybody always tends to talk about. I once had a coworker (a tech job, nothing shop related) who was on some pain medication for an unrelated issue, but was still able to fully move around and do stuff just fine. One day after work he decided to go out to his wood shop to do some hobby woodworking, and came back to work several days later getting to explain to everyone why he was suddenly missing two fingers, because it turns out because of the medication his head _wasn't_ quite clear enough to avoid making a dumb mistake that he would now get to live with for the rest of his life.
This stuff is not a joke. Never mess around with power tools if you don't feel absolutely 100%. It may seem like just a "stuffy head", but it can easily still be the difference between deciding to do something right or very very wrong at a critical moment.
can it run DOOM??
You couldn't be more right. I didn't drive for more than ten years because medication for a physical health issue was messing up my concentration. That was eventually changed, and my alertness improved considerably. But I still only drive when I know I'm feeling good.
"What did you do at work this week?"
"On Monday i started a directory listing which finished on Wednesday. Then i had to do it again, this time with the printer turned on, which took me to Friday afternoon..."
300 Baud, baby!
I'd forgotten how slow 300 baud was! First modem I used on a C64 was 300 baud... amazing how fast everything has got these days.
Oh man what a flashback! Many many years ago (probably around 1985) my dad brought one of these home from his job in silicon valley... and because it had a modem that meant I could head into the wild world of BBSes. I am sure I was pissing off every SYSOP connecting at 300 baud and hogging the lines but it was amazing!
Or me using my C64 and a 300 baud modem. I know well the joys of a 40 column display connecting to an 80 column machine. Though, to be fair, when connecting to a C64 aware server, the petsci graphics were awesome. Later I did upgrade to a 1200 baud.
Do you remember your favorite BBSes and what you found there?
@@no1DdC In my they were all Atari-only (ATASCII), connected via an MPP-1000C modem at 300 baud. I remember a few of them being in SoCal (818) and I was dialing in from NYC (212), using dubious AT&T long distance codes we got from a wardialer
Dude I had a 300/75 split speed. I could type faster than that modem could send. 2400 felt like lightning speed after that experience.
@@no1DdC Yup. Forums, warez, teleconference chat, games. My Apple //e had 80 columns so i didnt have to deal with 40 column most of the time. Apple bbs' could use ProTERM Special Emulation to get a semi graphical output which could also be used for gui menus and windows using mousetext. Later i used my apple to connect to a unix shell where i could chat on irc, access files via ftp, archie and telnet to play muds or chat
Get well soon. Terminals are super cool. Really miss the good old days at the public library with the amber colored terminal screens.
I kind of was hoping that this one would have an amber phosphor, but the white phosphor still looks really good.
I'm already feeling tons better, I should be right as rain in a few days!
Yeah.
I think when I first encountered those as a child in the late 90s they were kinda on their way out. The county public library system used Dynix for searching the catalog and managing borrowed materials.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)
But it's very nostalgic in some ways and was very much a hallmark of a
time before the internet/WWW.
Aww - a Fisher Price My First Terminal. That's gorgeous.
Looks like something from the movie "Brazil".
Yes! Needs a nice big Fesnel lens.
I was thinking 1984
@@beauslimYes, this. With some nice edge distortion.
When your previous interaction with the computer was through punch cards, 300 baud dial-up was GLORIOUS!
Guy needs a landline and then set up a BBS for us to hack into.
Yes! A BBS would be amazing.
"This equipment has not been tested to show compliance with new FCC rules" ... I never ever saw something like this on a commercial product 😃
This is probably due to TI's experience with said new rules and the TI-99/4.
That 300 BAUD really brings back memories, my first MODEM was 300 BAUD and I thought it was absolutely magical.
I skipped 1200 BAUD and went to 2400 BAUD later and thought that was absolute lighting.
My first was 1200/75 split baud rate, used for Viewdata, 75 baud commands up and then page reception at 1200 down.
My first modem was 300 baud, too. I used it to get on an IBM computer at my college in the 1980s, so I could write and run my Pascal language class assignments. When I was done with the assignment, I entered a command that caused my assignment to print on a high-speed line printer, where it would be retrieved and graded by a teaching assistant. My class was the last to use that computer.
Yeah, same here. I had a neighbor with a 300 BAUD acoustic coupler (TRS, I'm pretty sure) that he decided he had no use for, and gave it to me.
I didn't get a Hayes internal modem until a few years and a new computer later.
@@hDansRandomCrud my first 300 BAUD acoustic coupler MODEM was from the TRS-80 of a friends dad. He loaned it to me until I got my own.
The switch on the back is local echo on/off, not half/full duplex.
I thought the local copy switch echoed the terminal to the printer port so you quite literally ended up with a local copy (teletype style)
I blame a mixture of the cold meds, and the fact that the article called it "full duplex and echoplex," which tripped me up!
@@UsagiElectric 🤔 So, back in the day, echoplex wasn't just for Don Ellis' trumpet? 😅
@@UsagiElectric My limited experiance of double charactors on the screen was the result of the computer you were connected to sending the data back as to show a good connection and "echo on" being an option for when the computer did not echo the charactor back.
@@andrewlarkin200 Ooo I didn't think of that use.
I do love your honesty. I made the mistake many years ago whilst on flu meds, I chose to use a band saw and nearly took my thumb off. Never again. I agree this one is cute.I know I should write a comment at the end but just wanted to jump in. Really enjoying your channel. Thank you. It’s a bit of reminiscing but also it’s what our technology was built on and you can’t ignore it. All the best from the UK.
Huh, I thought it was a BBC Micro or something alike. The visual style down to the color scheme is uncanny!
It’s amazing how far computers have come in the last 50 years. What a clean example of a little data terminal. I graduated in the mid nineties and used computers quite a bit, started off in middle school with the Apple IIE system and went from there. We had an early DOS computer at home and I remember how huge of a jump it was to go to windows 3.1. Thanks for the video. Hopefully you are feeling better. Can’t wait to see the Bendix up and running.
The TMS1000 also was the brain of my first computer game, a Merlin!
Much, much later I was amazed, that my cute game was using the first (or one of the first?) microcontrollers that existed! (And it was born the same year as I was! :D)
In the late 1970s, 300 baud (30 characters per second) was considered "high speed" as compared to 110 baud (10 CPS).
This reminds me of what I might have been doing with my Apple ll with a DC Hayes modem - also 80x24, upper case only. Anyone remember The Source, which lost out to CompuuServe?
How much did those things cost at the time?
Isn't that keyboard too small to type on comfortably?
Enough power to run a CRT over a DB9 connector? Is that dangerous?
Get well soon!
CRTs use high voltages, but they don't use much current. As long as the cable is well-enough insulated for a couple kilovolts, the RJ-style plug is fine.
@@McTroyd Didn't look like the base had any HV stuff on it. No flyback or anything. But a CRT that small, and B&W only, didn't need much current, you are correct there. But i bet the HV is all in the "monitor" itself. But 12 or 24Vdc over the RJ would have been doable easily, and not too much current for that type of cable.
I wanted to see in the CRT to see who a DB9 could handle that!
@@jeromethiel4323 Good point about the HV in the monitor. Makes sense they wouldn't otherwise need that in the terminal.
@@McTroyd Not claiming i am correct, we'd need to see inside the monitor to really know. Just my gut call based on not seeing any obvious HV generating circuitry or components in the base chasis.
I am more than willing to admit i might be wrong here. We really need to see more tear down or circuit diagrams.
16:10 When the terminal scrolls, a copy of the top line that scrolled off flickers at the bottom briefly. I guess it has exactly enough RAM to hold the whole screen (960 cells), and uses some kind of address offsetting to do the scrolling (e.g. by changing what value a counter starts at in the renderer), so it can rotate the top rows to the bottom and then clear them. The rendering would have to be faster than the clearing to produce that glitch.
That looks like what you'd see in a comic as a 70's computer. It's right up there with the Commodore Pet. Decades ago, I had a little Tektronix data terminal connected to a PC running Linux that I had set up as a router, mail server, and a few other functions for those of us sharing a two bedroom apartment. A company a friend was working for was dumping a bunch of them and he offered me one. It worked perfectly for the task and when not needed, I simply stored it on a shelf in the closet. I wish I still had it.
Ya want another one? Ours worked okay, than got silly. Never tried to troubleshoot, but never threw it out. Figured it was PMOS depletion-mode rot. Considered fleabay, but sending it to you sounds more useful, especially if it serves as a parts donor down the line. YT will notify me if you reply. Love your stuff. Ciao!
I did my grad work in Chemistry, and the department's library had a TI Silent 700 series terminal to access journal databases. How I wish they had this. And I just loved those clacky keyboards.
Awesome!! Also fun to see a YT video where the thing just works... Feel better soon!
Well... I never thought I'd say this about a data terminal... but I agree with you it _IS_ cute, and it brings back some nostalgia for me from my days at college in the early 80's.
I remember working on my homework assignments on data terminals in the computer lab in college, they were the larger 80 Column like the ADD's and Hazeltine and they were connected to the DEC-10 at 300 Baud for the students. Then one day I saw the "Special terminal" in a closet that is reserved for use by faculty, it was running it at 9600, that was a real WOW moment for me! But as we know, the technology improved and speeds ramped up quickly, the data communications got better, and the infrastructure improved; Today we have amazing high-speed connections that we take for granted, but it had humble beginnings and it had to start from somewhere.
Love it. Reminds me of when I used my Nortel Display Phone to call into local BBS and with Packet Radio.
Cute little terminal - and hooking it to the Centurion takes it to a whole new level!
Sweet kitties too.
I wonder if you could log into basic ASCII BBSes with that. You can still dial into them today. I’ve done so with my USR Courier recently, actually.
You may be able to set up a VoIP with an analog adapter…
If you really want to run it over a "phone line" without having an actual phone line, pick up a Hayes 1200/300 modem, configure it for auto-answer mode, and pick up a used phone line simulator for under $50.
That's a lovely thing. When I first saw it I thought 'wow, a TI SilentType but with a VDU' and that's exactly what it is. To a point, anyway. Get well soon Dave.
This little terminals big brother, the DS990 Model 1, watched this from across the room 😁
TI had some amazing products back in the 70s and 80s. What a wild time it was!
Get well soon!!
Very interesting, and cute, terminal. That's a cool bit of kit. I think you were confusing duplex with local echo though. Duplex is the ability to send and receive data at the same time, or not. (half being you can only send or receive at any moment, full means you can do both at the same time). Echo on the other hand is simply copying what you send to the local display as you send it. (so no-echo would rely on the host to send back what it receives from you so you can see it)
Indeed, I remember getting a printout of local BBS's that had all the phone numbers, that included what stop bits, baud rate, parity, and local echo or not etc. You knew you had local echo setup wrong when everything you typed ddoouubblleedd uupp
naw thats a standard 80 column CRT, you must be seeing it through the cold meds! That is certainly adorable.
i love it , the printing on the screen of every character one by one is so cool , reminds me of so many sci fi films
I went down a rabbit hole with a TRS-80 PT-210 data terminal... created a RS-232 expansion card replica for it (& posted on eBay), and retrofit its ROM (& posted the ROM mod) to support sending & printing lowercase characters as well (that involved reverse-engineering its font and creating/adding font bitmaps!). It's a thermal-printer terminal that prints on commodity fax-paper rolls (walked in and picked up a roll at Staples that works great), and... it, too, is a 300-baud terminal. It's a bit of a wild ride hooking it up to a modern *nix system and interacting with it - in fact, at work, I tunneled through my laptop and connected to a modern embedded system through Telnet.
Can confirm, 300 baud is of limited utility and involves gobs of patience, but moreso is the lack of control-character support. No backspace, no line movement, nothing except a stream of characters. A lot of improvement has been made since then, but it's sure got its charm!
I remember the PT-210 thread on VCfed forums from last year or so. I was impressed with how most of its limitations were entirely in software. It literally came down to not quite having enough keyboard keys to tell it to do enough things. Yes, even the printer font was in the main micro-controller, with room for lowercase! It's more brilliant than you would expect if you hadn't seen the insides of the design.
Nice! Agreed, it's a very well thought out design and construction.
Was also cool to see the somewhat related TI-99 "toys" you have, including the acoustic coupler :)
Get well soon, man! 👍
I'm sorry to hear that you've been under the weather, but awww, what an adorable video to make while you're convalescing! I had hoped to head out to VCF Midwest today to take in the show and meet some of my favorite TH-camrs in person (and I had hoped that would include you), but, alas, we're dealing with a li'l COVID this week at my house, so I decided the best thing to do for my fellow vintage computing fans is to sit this one out. 😓I live in the Chicago area, so maybe next year. Anyway, here's wishing you a speedy and complete recovery so you can get back to that G15 and Hawk drive and all the other cool content you have in your pipeline.
The keyboard is the same as the one they used on the BBC computer, in fact the case looks identical as well, nice looking machine.
10:00 TMS1000s were even used in ceiling fans for the Casablanca intel-i-touch series.
This thing would have been a budget hacker's dream in the late 70s/early 80s especially with that command module holding preloaded instructions. Not to mention being goddam adorable!
Indeed, I was thinking about script kiddies' uses...
What an adorable little guy. Also thanks for the kitties outro!
What a beautiful machine! And a great video explaining it.
(First time I saw a TMS1000 was in the MB Computer Battleships game I took apart as a kiddie, running the game and controlling a SN76477 sound IC.)
@ 11:40 - should be relatively easy to trace the pin-out of the edge connector, design a memory board, and 3D print a case for it 😄
Spent several years on the bench programming TMS1000 based devices for telephony (intelligent office phones, small telephone exchanges) at GEC in the yUK. The chips really were designed for I/O, ideally suited for keyboards, buttons, 7-seg LED displays, all sorts of things. My all-time fave with a 1000 was a 76-nibble program to control the function buttons and status LEDs of a telephone: now THAT was programming... 🤓👍
16:26 interesting how it flashes something (part of the line above?) in the lower right when the screen scrolls. Wonder if there's some sort of software bug or if it's intended to work that way?
Another comment theorized that it's a circular buffer with a race condition (or just a tad sloppy code). That means there would simply be a "top of screen" address pointer, and a "cursor" address pointer, with display and writing functions continuously streaming to a block of memory and simply cycling back to the top when it reaches the bottom. Easy way to maintain a screen of text without having to copy/move blocks of data to elicit scrolling.
I suspect this happens when the data consists of all wrapped lines, which happens a hellova lot more on a 40-column display mode than an 80. That causes it to miscalculate the top of screen, maybe, and ugly patches were done to make it display nicely.
It's one thing to have a simple concept, another to have to tack additional checks and features into it (like wrapping which super screws with addressing and calculation of buffer position)! Considering this thing only had, what... a 1KB ROM? 😂 (Oh, and possibly a 2KB ROM in the one used as a display controller) Everything written in direct machine code. No libraries to build from, and probably just one guy writing it. haha
If there was anything in the history of everything that needed googly eyes put on it, this is it.
If not already noted, you mix-up local echo and half/full duplex... full duplex is that the device can receive while sending.
What a great video! Super cool to see these tiny terminals, thank you for all the great content you put out!
I can agree milling when you’re sick is not a good idea. I’ve done it cause we needed to finish some small parts for a DOD project and I ended up faulting the tool changer in the HAAS twice, Also not thinking straight while trying to tram a vice in and issuing an M19 orientation command to watch the indicator go flying into the chip pan not fun. Get well soon hope sharing my experience with this also reinforces why it’s a bad idea.
The article said that you could get it to show you a 40-column view of an 80-column screen... but I suppose that's something that the terminal would have to be set up to do. Maybe wih some kind of internal function. And without a manual or really anything other than the terminal itself, that might be difficult.
Awesome and so cute! Thanks for sharing this unique bit of computing history!
In the early 90s, I was working on a system that used dialup. Rather than get a bunch of phone lines from Bell, we had a box from radio shack that was a 4 line phone switch. The server was on a modem on port 1, so to connect we were dialing “ATD1 “ from any other port. Worked great until we ran out of ports.
You need something like that for your server room. The ports were entirely analog so you could not use 57.6k modems, but anything slower would work great.
Modems will connect at slower modem to modem speeds and the RS232 ports will work at slower speeds. Because our modem issues were connecting to the computer side, we would lock the RS232 speed to the desired speed. If you considering getting a modem (do they still sell the things?) you should check the speeds they support. I may still have an old 300 baud one laying around here somewhere if I didn't get rid of it in the move.
This would get a 10/10 on repairability on iFixit. What a convenient assembly!
Really nice to see. Pick up on your health and don't rush it.
I think that terminal would feel 100% at home in an early Star Trek episode or maybe even better in Space 1999 ;) get well soon
BTW if you want your own phone system for fairly low amounts of money I can recommend you getting an ISDN PBX. Since analog telephony standards are virtually identical all over the world you could get it from Germany where they are really plentiful. You can even get something like a refurbished Fritz!Box 7490 which is an ADSL-WIFI-Router with DECT and 2 analog lines (no pulse dialing) and an internal ISDN S0 bus for something like 40 Euros. A larger modular ISDN PBX like a COMmander Basic 2 will set you back something like 50-200 Euros depending on the modules installed, but that can give you up to 32 analog ports, 8 ISDN ports, and one S2M 30 channel port.
Cute!
And yes, you absolutely need a PBX setup!
But simply for connecting two 300bps modems you can likely get away with just a wire between them. For slightly newer modems you would need a power source in series with them, like a tiny wall wart (regulated DC) or a 9V battery. Especially the older modems that don't do dialing and answering are "always online", I.E. there is no handshake/setup phase.
A PBX would be cooler though. Either go with something old analogue, possible electromechanical, or go with one that is modern enough that it can also do IP Telephony. If you go with IP Telephony, consider connecting it to a modern (-ish) computer running Asterisk with the add-on that lets you connect it to modern smart phones via Bluetooth. The modern phone will consider Asterisk as a headset, allowing Asterisk to make and receive calls. That way you can use your old analogue POTS telephones to make and receive calls routed through your smartphone. With multiple bluetooth dongles to the Asterisk computer each family member can be connected, offering endless possibilities to have complicated setups just for the sake of it. Or for that sake take/make calls using an old phone worth almost nothing when you for example are working on greasy/dirty stuff in your garage or so.
Get well soon. Adorable and cute are perfect words to describe that little terminal. So cool to see in action 😀
i dont wanna do it, but i'm very glad somebody is. i salute all our internet tech historians, your service is invaluable.
"Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.", is way cooler than the quick brown fox...just sayin...
Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz?
Alternatively, "Sphinx of quartz, judge my _black_ vow". I used this in my own video due to line wrap reasons.
Beagle Bros used "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs".
@@fnjesusfreakRepeated 'e' tho ...
@@halfsourlizard9319 And "Sphinx..." has a doubled U. Neither is a perfect pangram.
Man that thing is cool.
Hey, I pray you feel better soon.
@7:41 I believe that "Local Copy" enables or disable Echo function, rather than Duplex setting.
Fantastic servicability and design on that one. :)
3:44 - yeah, and already broken (crack in lower left corner). How I hate those keyboards. Had one of those on the PET, it got stuck and bent and cracked and it was the biggest crap ever designed.
I didn’t have a chance to watch Voyager when it was airing, work, school & family got in the way. Fast forward to the great binge-watch of 2020 and I finally got to see it. Gotta say, Janeway is up there with my fav captains now.
The kitties were thinking.. hey I knew there's a cute little baby bunny around here SOMEwhere! I am SURE of it.. let me poke around here and there.. : )
"Only by KEEPING EVERY PIECE OF HARDWARE YOU HAPPENED TO TOUCH EVEN ONCE can you truly face your past and savour retrocomputing joy"
the tiny terminal is niiiiice!))
get well soon, David!
Hi.
That terminal is really cute. :)
Another great video. A big thank you and wish you get back to 100% soon.
One note, you are using the expressions "half-duplex" and "ful-duplex" in a wrong way.
That feature controled by the switch in the back of the terminal, is called "Local Echo". When ON any typed character is echoed to the screen locally; When Off you only see on the screen whatever the remote host sends. When you are getting double characters means the the "Local Echo" is ON and the software on the remote host is echoing back what it receives.
This feature is still available on the terminal emulator applications like "putty", "GTKterm", "Minicom",.....
Back in the day remote terminals were used in "transational mode" instead of interactive. In this mode the application fills the screen with a mask (form), then the operator fills in the relevant fields on that screen with the terminal operating in local mode (no comms involved), in the end the whole data filled by the user was sent at once to the the host system, only the data, not the mask. Terminals of that era even have a special "transmit key" (XMIT or SEND) to send the data from the terminal memory. It think its that red key on the right.
Operation in interactive mode, like we are used today, was undesirable due to the very slow communications available in those days.
But..., in some applications, "transational operation" is still in use today; just take a look at how "HTML Forms" work.
Full/Half duplex relates to the communication hardware, either it can send and receive simultaneously or not. For example, with a terminal directly connected to your Centurion by an RS-232 line you can have full duplex due to the separated TX and RX wires. But if you connect via a phone line and a pair of modems, than you are limited to half duplex because the phone line is a one way carrier. A modern example of "half-duplex" can be the I2C protocol, and for "full-duplex" we can think of the SPI protocol, both used in micro controller based electronics.
Just another note, you seem to have stumbled in the great grand father of the F1...F12 keys on a modern PC keyboard. That "command module" with the pre recorded character sequences triggered by the "function" key..
An easy solution to the phone line issue is to get a PABX like the SOHO SP-208. They require zero setup and allow you to dial between 8 extension lines with analog phones and Modems. Much easier than setting up asterisk pbx.
Terminal must be using a circular buffer with a race condition for scrolling you get a flash of what was on top of the screen at the bottom before it clears it
At the time it was common to scroll the screen by changing the line start address, with the VDU scan hardware managing wrap from the last screen line address. With this scroll method there is no time when a slow CPU can clear the old (now off screen) line without it being seen. A faster CPU would aim to clear the line of screen memory in the horizontal blank interval.
Is it me... or does this look very similar to a BBC-B Microcomputer (just with a small VDU added)?
I like how it has the aesthetic that survived into mid-80s Japanese MSX, but that cute little off-center CRT is incredible. And the way it mounts with a single RJ connector is brilliant!
3:45 pretty standard HiTek/Stackpole keys, very nice to type on. My first TRS-80 used them, and I did love it. They basically don't break unless you get in there and bend the little metal fingers.
TMS-1000? Well, it's TI, so of course, but still, wow. That let them get the jump on this kind of design when everyone else was dependent on Motorola or Intel or even weirder mainstream CPUs that needed an actual address and data bus.
EDIT: those keys don't break unless you break them, OR the plastic plunger splits its corners after decades of fatigue, something I've had to deal with in my ADM-3A terminal! At least I have spare junk keyboards from back in the day as donors.
Great episode thank you for posting it even though you're recovering from your bug. Take Care😎
I think Local Copy would send both uplink and downlink information to a local serial printer. It's why there are two DB-25s on the rear panel; one is for a printer or TTY.
Hope you feel better soon. Your video today was excellent, I love to see vintage equipment that is working. That's what my wife says when I'm working in my shop.
That idea of a home terminal gave me Minitel vibes. Minitel was a home terminal that was use in France from the early 80s - users could use it to look up phone number, book tickets etc.
AKA Videotex or "VTX". The web made it redundant just a few years later.
@@IlBiggo they probably mentioned Minitel because it actually lasted until the early-00s in France, whereas all the other interactive Videotex(t) systems in other countries were always pretty niche (and expensive) so were quickly abandoned even by their few users.
That thing is delightful. Original and unrestored!
That's the best shape for things to be in.
I swear I have seen something like that on "Space 1999"!!!!
WOW! Even though this item is a little outdated for my needs,
it's impressive how well it is designed.
I would use those (form factor) design concepts in current products.
How everything is 99% tool less disassembly...
I was facing a similar issue with a 24x8 LCD display,
trying to figure out how to format data to fit correctly...
13:05 Astatic D-104 sighted on the shelf directly over your head. Do you use it for anything?
I know well the joys of connecting a 40 column display to an 80 column server at 300 baud. I was a teenager in the 80s with my C64 and my Might Mo 300 baud modem. Around 1990, I upgraded to a 1200 baud Commodore modem. So much blazing speed.
But the nice thing about the C64 was when you connected to a server for a C64. The PETSCII graphics were awesome. 1200 baud was plenty fast for downloading software with everything being limited to 64k. Many games were limited to 16k which was even quicker to download.
How was that 17 minutes? As soon as you started talking about it, the video was over! What fun :) Get well soon and keep up the great work.
Our local supermarkets used terminals similar to that one, years ago. One or two hardware trade stores still have them, albeit running a little faster than 300 baud; probably 9600 baud, judging by the screen data scrolling speeds. Those Texas devices seem to be almost bombproof.
And, off-topic, I know of at least one person who was still running Windows 3.11 on an early Pentium for his small business, until he retired about 5 years ago. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'
Telephone shenanigans: Find yourself a Teltone TLS Telephone Line Simulator. The TLS-3 (A or B models are preferred) will give you 2 lines, the TLS-4 or -5 will provide 4 lines.
Does this have terminal control emulation (eg - Adds/ADM/VT etc) or does it use it's own control codes or is it just 'dumb' ??
Get well soon!
Unexpected Marie Kondo reference! I literally brought down a bunch of clothes to Kondo-fold into an empty drawer while watching this, but that terminal was just too cool so I ended up not folding a thing...
Id like to complement your camera work.
Clint and yourself are the two best for it on enthusiast tech tube.
I recall from an old video that your Centurion came with a modem to receive incoming connections? Or was that something else that multiplexed lots of terminals?
very much like how I started my computer career in 1976. 300 baud acoustic couplers to connect an ADM-3A to our school district's HP-2000.
Terminals shaped like a friend? We need more of these! Get well soon! 😷
TI Fanboy....now I get why I really enjoy your videos. TI 99/4A (1982) for this guy. The day the earth changed for me. Take care and get well.
i used a draytec vigor 2800 adsl modem here in the UK - it had two analog phone ports on it and you can call the other port by dialing a number - so in a tiny box you have a standalone two extension analog phone system and you can play bbs with it
15:00 it's a local echo switch? (not full/half duplex)
awwww I can picture it making cute Star Wars droid noises
Bleep bloop!
Sounds like an R2 unit!
Like Michael Winslow in Spaceballs as the radar technician!
@@marcusdamberger "I'm having trouble with the radar, sir. I've lost the bleeps, the sweeps and the creeps!" 😂
Love your videos, and especially this one since it reminds me just how painfully slow 300 baud was!
That slow 300 baud text scroll makes it look extra cool. It's like Mother from the Nostromo. It just needs a 70's sound effect.
I am in love, I need a modern one of these to control stuff in my house
lol, first thing I thought of was Johnny Five. Get well soon btw!
Nice! Star Trek tech! :)
Get well man, we will still be here if you need to skip a week to get better.
Imagine if modern laptops were made with that level of serviceability, now a days you have to take 10 screws and pray you don't break a plastic clip just to disconnect the battery or upgrade the memory and storage (that is if your laptop still has sockets installed for all that).
Looks like a silent 700 with a screen instead of the printer...
When you panned over to the speech synthesizer on the TI-99, I noticed the card slot on that is also called a Command Module.
Do they use the same edge connection?