Episode: 3341
Title: HPR3341: Linux on a serial Terminal - And Jorome's MainFrame Challenge
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3341/hpr3341.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 21:08:36

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3341, for Monday the 24th of May 2021.
Tid's show is entitled, Linuxana Serial Terminal, and Jawroam's mainframe challenge.
It is the 60th show of JWP, and is about 5 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, my experiment with Getty, and a Getty ANSI,
and wanting to have a Serial Terminal mainframe.
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Good day, everyone.
Hey, I hope the day and COVID times find you well.
Hey, I wanted to do a shorter one in Jawroam from the Netherlands.
The guy that does the mainframe on Raspberry Pi, he sort of had me the inspiration.
Last time we were at Fast Down together, and I've been, I've been emailing Jawroam a little bit,
but I sort of took his challenge. I didn't exactly do the mainframe thing,
but I have a challenge for Jawroam, and I'll do it at the end of the show.
So what I did was, I found in the trash at work, two old terminals, and they're old HP 96,
76 terminals, and I got them out of the trash and turned them on and plugged them in, and they
still work. Neither one of them is the best, and then I got a permission from a boss to go ahead
and be able to take those home and play with them. I took one of them, because I don't have room
downstairs for two of them to be hooked up at the same time, but I took the one and the best picture,
and I hooked it up to an old thin client. The thin client is from Fujitsu, and it has an AMD
dual-core processor with four gigabytes of RAM, and I put an M2 slot in it, and I put
480 gigabytes in there, and it runs Zubo2 on it, and so I started going through the things that
make Ageti and Geti work with that terminal, and it was pretty interesting. I was hoping for a
little more of a graphical kind of thing, but so far I haven't got the full ASCII experience with
that thing, and so it emulates VT200, and it was quite useful. Now the most interesting about it was
that it has that nice old 1980s keyboard clicking, feeling, oh my god, feeling, right?
So, and you can still find these old terminals on eBay fairly inexpensively, but probably the
best place to find it is free markets, goodwill, used electronic stores, because the people on eBay,
they like vintage, and they sort of rack up the price on that kind of stuff. What to find it is
really used computer places, old super old electronics, any kind of warehouse kind of cash and
carry things, because the shipping is always such a big thing on something like that, if you find
a terminal like that, and I mean Jerome had a great talk at fostering about that stuff. I had an old
stuff and trying to pay the shipping and having, you know, I had a, for several years I had an old
Vax machine, and I ran that Vax machine downstairs, and Vax, just like the sun boxes, they have
thin ones and fat ones, and they came in all sizes and shapes. And so if I really wanted to get my
open VMS on now, I would probably have to emulate it, it wouldn't work, but so my challenge to Jerome,
my four minutes end, is Jerome, man, hey, I think we need to, when COVID is over, you have your
vaccine, I have my vaccine, you have your mask, I have my mask, we've got to get together, man,
now, and either meet at Ken's house or meet somewhere there, up there by Amsterdam, where you're
up there, and I've got a raspberry, I've got a plethora of raspberry, so it's just a short email,
and what I want to do is I want to take that terminal, and I want to put that main frame thing
on the raspberry, and I want to make the terminal talk to the raspberry and do the main frame,
so I wonder if that's actually possible, right, if that's actually possible. The Jerome, if you're
out there listening, you think about it, Ken, if you happen to run into Jerome and your wanderings
in the Netherlands, you please let him know that I have that idea, and that I'm really, really
interested in it. All right, guys, if you need to reach me, JWP5 at hotmail.com, thank you so much.
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