LCD dumb terminal

[MykeLawson]

I know there are the adapters that you can plug a keyboard, VGA display into, and then connect to an RS232 interface, but did anyone actually make an LCD based dumb ASCII terminal?

 

[g4ugm]

I don't think so. By the time LCD displays arrived, most dumb terminals were a box that you plugged the keyboard and display into. In fact from well before that terminals had migrated from a box with everything in to separate units, usually to conform to health and safety regulations. So the UK regs

The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992

www.legislation.gov.uk

state:-

The screen must swivel and tilt easily and freely to suit the needs of the operator or user.

&

The keyboard shall be tiltable and separate from the screen so as to allow the operator or user to find a comfortable working position avoiding fatigue in the arms or hands.

so that pretty much requires a box with a separate screen and keyboard, or perhaps like the VT220 everything in the box, but I think everything after the VT220 was three boxes.

There are some small devices but again these are usually for special functions, such as equipment control...

 

[snuci]

I hate to contradict but I just recently acquired an Informer 213AE that is a VT100 terminal with LCD and keyboard that can be separated. It has RS-232 and a built-in modem. I personally love the odd esthetic and the EL display. There is also an Informer 213 that is IBM SNA/SDLC.

Had to look that last bit up on terminals-wiki as I didn't recall the IBM terminal emulation. Looking around, it turns out there are others in the LCD category here: https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Category:LCD

Here's a picture of the Setup menu.



Hope this helps.
Santo

 

[MykeLawson]

Quite interesting to find that there were a couple of them anyway. I was never a fan of the aesthetics of the 'flip phone' type of computer stuff. I always loved the ADM-3A, and it's similar ilk; or maybe the old IBM 3151 and DEC VT-300 types. It would be easy enough to rip out the CRT and it's associated electronics and swap in a current LCD and it's electronics; but the harder part is the mechanical rework of the case due to the curved parts required for the CRT mounting. Who knows, maybe I find something at some computer show that works and doesn't have cataracts....

 

[Al Kossow]

I hate to contradict but I just recently acquired an Informer 213AE that is a VT100 terminal with LCD and keyboard that can be separated.

That isn't an LCD and that panel is the first thing to fail on Informer terminals.

Turning one of the useless new Chinese 8088 LCD systems into a dumb terminal would
be a use for an overpriced piece of junk.

I had looked at taking a cheap ARM laptop and turning it into a terminal, but trying to do
any software hacks to hardware designed around an Android SOC was an exercise in
frustration.

 

[BlaBla1985]

There were also the Random Colleague and Random Colleague Plus terminals, as seen here on some Wiki: Link
These do have LCD displays.

I almost bought one of those on Ebay once upon a time but didn't win the auction.

 

[MykeLawson]

I 'suppose', with a bit of metal work, fashion a case to be similar to the Zenith/Heath, or Hazeline, terminals. Use a LCD/VGA display and a keyboard, hook it up to the Digital Research Computers ZRT80 Video Terminal (https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/digital-research-computers-zrt80-video-terminal.1250655/) with some 'glue' to convert the video to VGA and make a 'retro' terminal. Of course, the old terminals weighed a lot, so you'd need to add a brick or two so it feels the same.....

 

[g4ugm]

Its not dumb either. From

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/informer/Informer_213/Informer_213PT_Brochure.pdf

And it's more. With a singlekeystroke, the 213PT becomes a 386SX-classpersonal computer complete with DOS andup to 4 megabytes of on-board memory withbattery back-up.

 

[g4ugm]

There were also the Random Colleague and Random Colleague Plus terminals, as seen here on some Wiki: Link
These do have LCD displays.

I almost bought one of those on Ebay once upon a time but didn't win the auction.

Nice, I wonder how many of those were made. There are some pics on Facebook here:-

Retro Microcomputers, Workstations, Servers and Consoles - Welcome! | The 1988 Random Colleague portable serial terminal... | Facebook

The 1988 Random Colleague portable serial terminal...

www.facebook.com

and looking at them I can see why these early LCDs weren't popular -> so hard to read...

 

[MykeLawson]

I 'suppose', with a bit of metal work, fashion a case to be similar to the Zenith/Heath, or Hazeline, terminals. Use a LCD/VGA display and a keyboard, hook it up to the Digital Research Computers ZRT80 Video Terminal (https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/digital-research-computers-zrt80-video-terminal.1250655/) with some 'glue' to convert the video to VGA and make a 'retro' terminal. Of course, the old terminals weighed a lot, so you'd need to add a brick or two so it feels the same.....

I wonder where I could find dimensions on a few to the 'box' type dumb terminals from yester-year?

 

[vwestlife]

Here's a homemade one:

 

[g4ugm]

Had to look that last bit up on terminals-wiki as I didn't recall the IBM terminal emulation. Looking around, it turns out there are others in the LCD category here: https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/Category:LCD

Yes but only the Random is a true terminal. The others are more as I said

There are some small devices but again these are usually for special functions, such as equipment control...

and I think I can be excused for not knowing about the Random, they must be like hens teeth...

... IBM did produce a terminal with a flat screen display, the 3290, but its a plasma screen not LCD and the 3290 is I think "semi intelligent" supporting multiple sessions..
.. oh and it is 3270 coax connected, not ASCII RS232.

 

[Al Kossow]

I assume someone wants something portable, rather than the butt-ugly FT80
Why would anyone build something with a keyboard that hideous???
That is what you can't buy. Just a dumb, lightweight doesn't look like a home-made
POS terminal with an LCD, batterry powered, with a proper RS-232 port and a good keyboard designed for an
adult, preferably with enough keys for full vt-100 emulation

I tried modern small "laptops", and they are just tablets with a keyboard grafted on. No serial
ports, so a random USB dongle w/o proper RS232 levels.

The Atom-era tiny non-android tiny laptops came close, but, again require USB serial dongles
and good luck finding replacement batteries, since the Li-Ion original ones are all dead from
being run down to 0V for a decade.

 

[BlaBla1985]

and I think I can be excused for not knowing about the Random, they must be like hens teeth...

I have indeed never seen one for sale since, but I did found and saved the service manual for it just in case I ever got my hands on one. But those greenish LCDs with dark characters (probably non backlit) are indeed horrible to read. And anything that changes to quickly becomes a blur.

 

[gslick]

One nice terminal that existed 30+ years ago was the Planar ELT-320. At the name suggests, it used a bright and sharp electroluminescent flat panel, not an LCD, and emulated a DEC VT-320 terminal, and could use a standard DEC LD-401 keyboard. They were probably expensive new back in the day, and maybe even more so today if you can find one.

I picked up one on eBay many years ago for what didn't seem expensive at the time. Unfortunately it died a few years ago and I haven't gotten around to seeing if I can get it working again. Without investigating, my first guess is bad caps in the HV supply for the EL panel, which might not be too bad to fix if that is the case. I should really get around to working on that.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

and looking at them I can see why these early LCDs weren't popular -> so hard to read...

The other reason why these weren't popular is by the time 80x25 LCDs existed the cost difference between a dumb terminal and a full computer that could run a perfectly reasonable VT-100 emulation was basically nil. The list price of the Random Colleague terminals was $995; the Toshiba T1000, a full PC compatible laptop that came out at almost exactly the same time with similar physical dimensions (was actually a hair lighter) listed at $1199, but had a street price as low as $850. (You're a lot more likely to get a discount on a mass-market item like a PC laptop than a specialty terminal.) The Toshiba could boot DOS from ROM and be fitted with a non-volatile RAMdisk, so you didn't even need to carry a floppy if that was a dealbreaker.

FWIW, the Bondwell-2 CP/M laptop was out a year before either of them and also listed at $995; I'm going to guess the guts of the "dedicated terminal" were probably close to the 4Mhz Z80 in the Bondwell, and it came with a disk drive and the (at this point) usual Microprose software suite, so unless you *really* very specifically needed a portable dumb terminal it really wouldn't make any sense not to just get the same screen in a full computer.

 

[stepleton]

If you like the IBM 3290 as an answer then a PLATO IV terminal might be an slightly better one than that since it could use ASCII where the 3290 used EBCDIC (but I'm not sure on either score). It even has graphics!

 

[Eudimorphodon]

If you like the IBM 3290 as an answer then a PLATO IV terminal might be an slightly better one than that since it could use ASCII where the 3290 used EBCDIC (but I'm not sure on either score). It even has graphics!

Of course it's not exactly compact despite its "flat" screen.

(Random trivia: The reason it uses the plasma screen isn't because it was "more futuristic" than a CRT, although you might be fooled into thinking that's why just because of how Star Trek Plato was at the time. They used it because the plasma screen tech they opted for doesn't need separate video memory; the individual plasma cells can be "flipped" from light to dark with an XY access pulse and they'll stay that way until accessed again; it's basically digital paper. The screen was expensive but the memory for a 512x512 bitmapped mono screen would have obscene in 1972; that's 32Kbytes worth of pixels.)

 

[jdreesen]

Without investigating, my first guess is bad caps in the HV supply for the EL panel, which might not be too bad to fix if that is the case.

Both my ELT-320's have had leaking caps in the DC/DC convertor thay supplies the RS232 voltages.
And they are indeed very nice terminals, can use DEC or PC keyboards and work with an external 12V/2A supply.
Should have picked up all 10 that were available, instead of just these 2. They were for sale at CH25 each, ~32 USD... Long gone of course.

 

[stepleton]

They used it because the plasma screen tech they opted for doesn't need separate video memory; the individual plasma cells can be "flipped" from light to dark with an XY access pulse and they'll stay that way until accessed again

I wondered if this might be the case but didn't know; maybe some Tektronix sales rep wound up getting a smaller bonus that year. Could you flip a pixel back from dark to light as well, or were the displays like Tek vector storage displays and could only be whole-page erased?