Using the VT220 Serial Console as a Terminal in OS X

by _frog • 15 years ago

3 6 15 years ago

shimsham• 15 years ago

Better tell IBM we don't have mainframes anymore.

jstn2• 15 years ago

I meant in the average computer-equipped office. By the way, if anyone knows where I can get a Cray X-MP I'd love to hear about it.

angdis• 15 years ago

Can this be made to work using only the existing MAC keyboard? Or do you have to have both the VT220 and MAC keyboards on your desk?

tresta• 15 years ago

If you only want a top window for example, you could make gettytab spawn one of those. But that would make it impossible to input anything to it.

If you want input as well, you could make gettytab spawn a screen session that you could then connect to from Terminal.app. But this would force you to have a terminal window open showing the same screen as the VT220, which would somewhat defeat the purpose.

It would also be possible to write a small script that spawns on the tty that would take its input from a file, or even from a network connection (using netcat, for instance). This would of course come with some security implications as well. Especially considering that the tty process will have root permissions (at least unless you drop privileges in the script).

Edit: I should probably make it clear: As far as I'm aware, you can't make the computer believe that input from the mac keyboard comes from the VT220. At least not trivially. But you can get around it using some other techniques.

jstn2• 15 years ago

It's a standalone device, but the keyboard is almost as cool as the screen.

X4• 15 years ago

mhhmm reminds me to the AS400 Terminal running on a ~20 year old black/green Monitor, in the last company I worked at :)

Also I find this pretty cool: http://mochasoft.dk/telnetbb.htm

Using the VT220 Serial Console as a Terminal in OS X

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