Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/20/reviving-an-ann-arbor-ambassad.html
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And the CPU that moves those bytes from the serial port into display memory is… not fast
It had a CPU? Wow. I believe the earliest video terminals just wrote characters into the video RAM. Some may have used hardware logic to scroll but others just wrapped around to the top.
I remember reading an article about an early terminal which had a novel “screen saver” feature, using a simple timer.
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The older logic-based video terminals were certainly faster at processing serial data, but they tended to have very limited escape sequences, if any. The Soroc IQ120 had a ROM based state machine to handle this task, as I recall. It could really move data.
As for the RPi, it ought to have some GPIO pins that could be used for handshake.
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Manufactured a couple doors down from what is now our excellent home brewing supply store!
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Jamie’s site is a thing of great beauty, an antidote to modern design.
Nobody who uses Emacs can use XON and XOFF for flow control, because you need ^S and ^Q to work, dammit.
So much erudite computer history in a single line of text.
The comments have a picture of a tiny Gandalf switch, too. I seem to remember working with a Gandalf that was the size of a refrigerator…
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Despite my age and profession, my first thought was:
#Why did there used to be so many flights out of Ann Arbor?
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