What if I don't want ANSI/VT-100? [LWN.net]

What if I don't want ANSI/VT-100?

Posted Apr 22, 2018 18:19 UTC (Sun) by jruschme (guest, #123864)
Parent article: A look at terminal emulators, part 1

I'm probably showing my age here, but it seems like the definition of a "terminal emulator" has drifted a bit over the years.

In a former life, I used to develop for a system where everything was hardcoded to Televideo terminals (basically, an enhanced ADM-3/3A). As microcomputers started to proliferate in our organization, there was a big push to identify programs which could let the PC emulate a Televideo, especially some of the special modes we used in our software. This is the kind of software I think of when I hear the term "terminal emulator".

Out of curiosity, do such packages still exist?

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What if I don't want ANSI/VT-100?

Posted Apr 23, 2018 11:01 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

This is basically what modern terminal emulators still do -- but the Unix world was so consumed by DEC VT terminals back in the day that almost all any of them can emulate is VT terminals. (curses papers over most of the cross-terminal differences the emulators create so carefully, so it's almost academic what they're emulating anyway. These days with all the extra escapes what they're emulating is to some degree themselves!)

xterm itself can also emulate a Tektronix 4014, an early graphics terminal, but that was largely useful in the early days: other than gnuplot it's been decades since I saw anything that knew how to render any output on a Tektronix. If something wants to produce graphical output these days there are many better options. :)

What if I don't want ANSI/VT-100?

Posted Apr 24, 2018 22:28 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

Actually even hardware terminals emulated each other. Many DEC terminals also rendered Tektronix 4014 graphics (e.g. the VT330/VT340). Lots of VT100s ran with expansion cards which added graphics capabilities, some not from DEC. There was a manufacturer called Retrographics which made a VT100 Tektronix graphics system which was commonly called the VT640, though that wasn't an actual DEC model number.