Modern replica/implementation of a dumb terminal?

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Tue Nov 26 23:54:00 2002

Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm thinking more towards commodity laptops because they are much
> more common. The LX palmtops certainly qualify for an out-of-the-box
> device that's easy to add a terminal emulator to.

The 95LX/100LX/200LX have the terminal emulator in the ROM; in fact
the 95LX's usefulness as a portable terminal is why I got interested
in the HP MS-DOS palmtops way back when. But it's been long enough
since I used a 95LX that I don't remember what its is like, other than
the less-than-24x80 screen. The 100LX/200LX have a usable VT100
emulation, and have a serial port that can do hardware flow control
which is a plus.

The 1000CX is a 100LX/200LX that just boots to MS-DOS without the
applications that are built-in to the 100LX/200LX; you'd need to add
an MS-DOS terminal emulator program to that, but then it would sit in
the internal RAMdisk until you let the batteries go flat. Maybe you
would put it on a PCMCIA flash card.

If you want to go the commodity laptop route, I wonder if the easiest
solution wouldn't be a flash device with an IDE connector. Just install
it as the "disk drive" and put FreeDOS and your favorite MS-DOS terminal
emulator. These things do turn up on eBay fairly regularly.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Tue Nov 26 2002 - 23:54:00 GMT