The keyboard on a DEC VT100 terminal. Somehow I can type really fast on that one without a lot of typos. The keys are really heavy which helps avoid half-pressing an adjacent key by accident.
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I had to use a DEC VT100 when I was in school and about the only thing I remember about it is how awful those keyboards were.
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I remember the keyboard being a nice mechanical one. The 2xx and later were those silicon dome ones. I think the 125 had the graphic capabilities I need, but the later ones are much more common.
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Nice. I signed up for the preorder. The first keyboard I used was an IBM Selectric on which I learned to type in a high school typing class. Great keyboard. Another aspiring software geek suggested the class. I am so glad I took his advice. The next keyboard I used was the DEC VT100. Again, a great keyboard. The third keyboard I used was on my Mac 128K. An okay keyboard. The fourth keyboard I used was an IBM Model M. An outstanding keyboard. I am typing on it now ;)
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Things I'm nostalgic for are slightly older like the VT100 and PDP 11 series. There was something just amazing about the soft blip when turning on the VT100, and something very powerful about clacking away on that keyboard, writing code to do whatever you could think of. But even if someone made a brand new VT 100 with a proper CRT and embedded a PDP 11 equivalent, would I pay $832.50 for it? Nah, probably not. Still, kudos to the team for successfully recreating the C64 in FGPA. Preserving digital heritage is important even if it's time consuming and expensive.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
> they were novel but they weren't actually good. that goes double for sixel: it was pretty cool to see the system manager loading a color image on his vt340+ but we're talking about a postage stamp per second. you could see the individual color planes loading Yeah that was my point. It was so slow it was really only usable for the usecases bringing extreme value. A vector drawing protocol like tectronix (still included in xterm also) would have been preferable. > the vt340 was a misguided engineering dead end. i think even the vt100 was a mistake, given that they had to put an entire computer inside of it to make it work, and it would have been a lot nicer to rethink how terminals could work in light of the new possibilities opened up by vlsi The VT340 yes. I don't think the VT100 was a dead-end. It wasn't the most popular terminal of its day for nothing. This was the time when microprocessors started powering everything from microwaves to fridges. A "whole computer" was still simpler than the VT05 which had no "computer" but a whole stack of PCBs full of discrete electronics. See how horribly deep it was to house all those electronics: http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:DEC_VT05_12170... . And despite all that its terminal protocol was super basic, it wasn't a lot more than a screen-based teletype. I think it's one of the most beautiful designs of the day though. Very star trek. The VT100 was a computer yes (there was actually a standalone CP/M version of it ca…