mastodon.me.uk is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Open, user-supported, corporation-free social media for the UK.

Administered by:

Server stats:

496
active users

I've reached the end of my first full week of using a terminal-only interface for my personal computing in 2024.

It has been quite a week.

I've had to pick up git, which is a whole new learning curve for me, and my knowledge of tmux has increased rapidly too.

But, in terms of getting done what I actually wanted to do? It has been absolutely fine... right up until the point when it was not, and then I struggled.

I'm writing notes as I go, for a future blogpost.

@neil You know some of us used an 80x25 text only screen and keyboard (connected via a serial line) all day, long before these new fangled "browser" things.

random thoughts

@revk @neil
Or just a 1200 baud modem, connecting to international numbers over very noisy lines...

@hittitezombie @revk @neil Back in 1991 a department of 14 of us shared a single 33MHz 386 with 16MB of RAM and a Stallion OnBoard 32-port RS-232 multiplexer driving about 16 Wyse 70 terminals and a couple of laser printers. Worked just fine, you got used to being a human type-ahead buffer b/c those TTYs were only updating at 9600 baud so it took about a second for vi to refresh a full screen.

@cstross @revk @neil 91 I was in high school, but about a decade later, similar setup were still in use with various Turkish companies, and I worked for the SCO Unix channel main reseller providing advice and support. Painful days...

@cstross @revk @neil mid 80s, when I was barely in middle-school, used to help my family dial into the BT Telecom Gold system over 1200 baud.

@hittitezombie @revk @neil I was working in SCO Techpubs in the EMEA headquarters in Watford (London suburbia). The next year we began to upgrade to X terminals then Open Desktop workstations for all, but I came in at the tail end of the "your PC is a mainframe! Just add SCO and a terminal multiplexer" era. Actually, compared to the previous decade's PDP-11s a 386 was pretty powerful.

NB: SCO in those days was a real UNIX VAR. They sold their name and IP to the idiots at Caldera in 97.

@cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil
I built a few SCADA systems running on SCO Xenix 386 in the early 1990s. One site required that the display terminals were connected by optical fibre. We used SunRiver cards to turn a few low-end "pizza box" PCs (with 80286 CPUs) into thin clients. Setup and testing was done on an old Amstrad PC1512 (8086 CPU) with one of the SunRiver cards installed.

@cstross A 33MHhz 386? You were lucky! In the mid-to-late 1980's I shared a 16-user 25MHz 68020 system running System-V UNIX (12 users plus a root terminal), via a DEC VT-220 terminal (with the amber phosphor).
I remember the 16-port I/O card being fitted as an upgrade (from 8?), and the later manuals were labelled "SCO-UNIX". Another later upgrade was the 1Gbyte SCSI HD.
We used vi, of course, but later moved to Gosling Emacs.
@hittitezombie @revk @neil

@dukethinrediv @cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil

I had a genuine VT-100 in my dorm room. DEC was clearing its warehouse so CS students were buying them for peanuts.

A beautiful piece of engineering.

@cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil But that is what vi was designed to be able to handle!
(My first Unix use was ~87 at college with our HP9000/8xx mini shared between a pile of vt100's and older, crapper terminals)

@revk @cstross @hittitezombie @neil Me neither; the only difference is that now I can have lots of terminals with vi's in all open at once!

@penguin42 @cstross @hittitezombie @neil I forget how I did it, but we had virtual terminals, somehow, I vaguely remember ESC and a digit or something. That was a revelation.

@cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil In 1991, I happily tended the VAX in the chilled server room, in part because I was able to use the blisteringly-fast 9600 bps console terminal instead of the 2400 bps terminals elsewhere that I had to use the rest of the time. Got a lot done, both ways!

(They conserved money in the form of wire and VAX ports, by 4:1 multiplexing four 2400 bps RS-232 VT-102s onto a single 9600 bps RS-422 with custom hardware, and demuxed with modified drivers on the VAX; thus the 2400 bps limitation when not at the console terminal.)

@cstross @hittitezombie @revk @neil lol sounds about right. - same time the west philly hacker house that became the ISP martnet was powered off of the same with access given by dumpster dived VT terminals and our own custom made serial ribbons streaming all over the house ... X11 @9600bps was Soo slow 😆

@hittitezombie @revk @neil
As an undergrad I had to carry my bits by hand in a backpack, through the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, fighting off wolves...

I've spent several years in terminal only environments, and things worked fine.

But today we're using computers for tasks such as browsing that were never a thing back then, and they aren't designed with a text interface in mind. Some things really are better with a GUI.

@jannem @revk @neil
My undergrad years started in '92 with access to an IBM mainframe. Those were the days! Internet wasn't connected to the country yet, but we had access to a 9600baud Bitnet connection which was revolutionary! Relay chat, FTP and Gopher clients...

@a_cubed @jannem @hittitezombie @revk @neil I remember doing my first bit of uni coursework in ~’93 with gopher and WAIS 😬 #old