What are Dumb Terminals?

Thanks so much for swinging out to the ranch, I had a blast hanging out!

I can recall as a small child, my mom coming home from work (at Sears) telling us that they were going to formally train her to "run the teletype machine". She was excited for it because it also came along with a small pay bump. 🙂

Hi 8 Bit Guy, I'm old and used dumb terminals at Texas Instruments but it's been so very long that I learned stuff too from your great video. Thank you so much. I feel very privileged that my life went from punch cards to cloud. It was an incredible journey.

Thanks for not assuming that everyone who watches your channel knows all this, but yet showing the information in a fun and interesting way! Always a joy to watch your content and your genuine passion for all things tech.

I think it's worth mentioning that in France they had Minitel, a system run by the Postal Office that put a terminal in every household in the early 80s. What started as a way to save money by having the phonebook in a computer instead of printing millions of copies each year ended up becoming a proto-internet of sorts, with people sending emails and doing online shopping. It even had the same problems as the internet but 2 decades early, like a start-up bubble and controversy about pornography to minors

The video called “The Mother of All Demos” from 1968 is a phenomenal video for vintage computer enthusiasts to watch. It demonstrated a video terminal to a live audience of 2,000 people, with the ability to edit text.

There were also X-Terminals (e.g the NCD19 from 1989) that acted just like dumb terminals but displayed graphics from Unix servers via the X11 protocol.

Wow! Brings back memories of early Silicon Valley when there were still fruit trees between the little office buildings. I worked at Tymeshare between '74-'77. thermal paper and teletypes. Later, wrote a lot of COBOL on dumb terminals. Blue/green bar paper. Mountains of it. The stone age. Thanks so much for this.

I remember my dad’s office at the Bethlehem Steel Corporate site and him calling down to the “computer”room to retrieve sales figures for his terminal. He’d do the work on a separate calculator and put the entries back into the terminal. When I was there before and after school, he’d give me a piece a paper and tell me to go to the computer room and find certain data tapes. At 7-12 years old, I learned how to spool those data tapes (under supervision, of course).

As a sysadmin, I still use terminals; not only during regular operations with virtual terminals, but when a system is seemingly unresponsive, the hosting provider can provide a serial connection to the faulty server and this gets piped as-is into a terminal emulator through internet. Same for virtual machines; we can setup a virtual serial port for the guest system, and literally pipe that from the host to get a working shell from the kernel even though SSH and sometimes virtual display are broken. It's very useful, as it's very basic and does not requires much working parts.

A lot of the older teletypes shown in the first part of the video (Model 15, 28KSR, and even 28ASR) were rebuilt in the late '60s and early '70s to be used with acoustic modems so deaf people could 'call' each other on the phone. I don't know if it still holds true anymore, but as late as the 1990s, there were some older deaf people in my area that had one lurking in a forgotten corner of their basement or garage...

Before ethernet, each of these terminals were linked by a dedicated serial/parallel cable to the main computer. That's why those suspended floors were needed for

What simply made it hard to use screens for text for a while was lack of good internal memory for the screens. NASA actually used physical overlays for most of the text and a display for numbers, this was recorded by a camera and multiplexed (read: made into TV channels) onto the displays in mission control

Terminal interfacing is still very much alive and relevant in modern IT. I’ve been a network engineer for ~27 years now. The vast majority of the equipment I work with every day still supports a physical serial connection to a terminal. Obviously this is almost always a terminal emulator these days, but a ‘dumb’ serial terminal would still work. When everything is at-least partially working properly, we can forego the serial connection and use IP (usually SSH) to emulate the serial connection over a network connection. But we always keep a serial connection handy for when lower level access is needed.

Great nostalgic topic for me. As a home health nurse in the 1990s we had dummy terminals at our agency that were connected to a AS 400 IBM computer located in the hospital. We were sternly warned always to log off the terminals every time we used them for if the units were shutdown by flipping the power switch or if the power went out the whole system likely would crash. I was amazed at how well the whole system of 30 terminals worked. The terminals were spread out across town, connected by dedicated phone lines. We used the system for ordering supplies, basic word processing, for entering forms to be transferred to the US government for reimbursement. However, in those early days I accidentally typed in a global record delete that began to rapidly erase every patient in succession from “A” to “Z”. I could see the names flashing by on the terminal so I flipped the power switch which surprisingly interrupted the loop. Three temporary secretaries were hired to re type about 280 records up to the letter “R” which took several days to enter. I kept silent about my mistake!

The first terminals I saw were in 1972 at the office where I registered for college. They had a whole room full of people using them. It seemed very futuristic. But as students we had to use teletypes and card readers...

The NASA mission control screens aren't really terminals but basically TVs; They received a video signal that was a live from a video camera that combined computer output and pre-rendered outputs

I love the layers of abstraction: a modern, graphical interface emulates a text-mode window that emulates a dumb terminal that emulates a teletype. EDIT: of course the whole thing probably runs in a virtual machine with virtual memory. Not sure when reality gets involved!

Thanks for calling the 13th Floor BBS! (Although it could hardly be considered "calling" these days considering it's not dial-up anymore, I suppose.) [13:22]

Its crazy seeing how far you have come since I first discovered you in the ibook g4 review days!