![]() ![]() If microcontroller terminals capture your interest, this isn’t the first we’ve brought you. He includes a graph example using these characters coloured with ANSI escape codes, and it’s certainly not what you expect from a terminal. Our favourite is probably the Symbols for Legacy Computing, an array of semigraphics characters that may be familiar to readers who have used an 8-bit home computer or two. ![]() So even if you have little use for a hardware terminal monitor there’s still plenty of interest to be found in those rarely-seen character sets. It’s fair to say that most of us who regularly use a terminal don’t go far beyond the ASCII, as it’s likely that a modern terminal will sit in a window over a desktop GUI. It’s something has done some work on, with his ILI9341TTY, a USB serial terminal monitor using an Arduino Uno and an ILI9341 LCD module that supports as many of the extended characters as possible. Thus a fully-featured terminal has a host of semigraphics characters from which surprisingly non-textual output can be created. But as the demands of computer systems extended beyond what mere ASCII could offer, their capabilities were extended with extra characters and graphical extensions whose descendants we see in today’s Unicode character sets and thus even in all those emojis on your mobile phone. The job of a dumb terminal was originally to be a continuation of that performed by a paper teletype, to send text from its keyboard and display any it receives on its screen. Posted in classic hacks, computer hacks Tagged serial terminal, teleprinter, typewriter We’ve featured a lot of typewriters here over the ears, but this isn’t the first that has received a terminal conversion. ![]() All that’s missing is a punched tape reader at its side! The result is a terminal in the old style, from the days when access to a computer was through a teletype rather than a screen. It uses its own character encoding dubbed “gdrascii”, for which there is a Python library that he could port to Rust. It has an intriguing 26-pin connector on its side which provides access to a 1200 baud serial port. ![]() The machine in question is a SIGMA SM 8200i typewriter, which is a rebadged version of the East German Erika S3004. There was a period of a few years in which electric typewriters and computers existed side-by-side though, and it’s one of these which has experimented with connecting to a computer for use as a printer or terminal. Typewriters are something which was once ubiquitous, yet which abruptly faded away and are now a rare sight. ![]()
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