WORST keyboards ever

From: Ed Kelleher <Pres_at_macro-inc.com>
Date: Mon Aug 30 04:48:49 2004

At 05:52 PM 8/29/2004, you wrote:
>> Their terminals had a rotary switch for baud rate at the upper left.
>> To freeze a listing that was scrolling by on their terminal, they'd
>> !quick! roll the switch to 0 baud or something, then !quick! roll it
>> back.
>>
>> What a kludge compared to Xon/Xoff ^S ^Q that decent terminals like
>> the VT52/VT100 used. :-)
>
>I used to use a VT50 with a rotary baud switch on the front.
>Never tried that trick, however (I think ^S/^Q worked fine
>with NorthStar BASIC on the IMSAI I had it connected to).

I don't think it would have worked,
at least with unmodified DEC hardware I was familiar with, but YMMV.

You might dial up the baud rate on the terminal side,
but the computer side baud rate was usually fixed with solder jumpers.

Later, DEC engineers -- pushing the envelope (the same ones whose answer to
IBM's Personal Computer was a 400 lbs cabinet based 11/03 with 8"
floppies), moved to wire wrap jumpers, but not on .1" centers so you could
use standard shorting clips.

Then the DH11 and DZ11 multi-line SLU's had programmable baud rates.
But baud rate was either a SYSGEN option,
or a keyboard monitor type command like SET TT1 BAUD=119200 (<g> right!),
something dumb terminals like the VT5x,VT1x, VT2x ... VTnx couldn't do by
themselves.

QBus CPU boards with built in SLU (KDF11-B, KDJ11-B, KA630 MVII etc.) could
dial up the SLU baud rate from a switch on the back panel of the box. But
this didn't change the terminal baud rate.

Like I say, I marvelled at how elegantly kludgy the HP terminals were.

Ed
Received on Mon Aug 30 2004 - 04:48:49 BST