What can I do with a vintage terminal?

[Floppies_only]

Gang,

I've just been considering vintage terminals. I remember studying a book from Radio Shack in the late seventies that said you could use one of these to run BASIC programs on a remote mainframe over a telephone line. That doesn't seem very exciting to me. I missed the BBS era, I was just wondering if there are any left that could be accessed with a terminal. Another question that I have is if these can be used in a "peer to peer" fasion. That is, you have two people who both have access to a telephone, and they use two terminals to send messages back and forth.

Is there anybody who would be willing to tell me what out of all of this is possible?

Thanks,
Sean

 

[NathanAllan]

remotely log in to a computer (if the function is supported) and send/recieve files,

yes, two people could 'chat' with each other over two terminals, two modems and a phone line,

with Linux, you can take over the linux box from a distance using it and a phone/modem,

it's not a terminal, but an Atari emulator that I use to talk to my Altos box,

I'm sure there are some games that you can play one other person against in a text-y environment out there somewhere.

Terminals are interesting beasties. These ideas aren't the end all be all of terminal ideas, just what I have read about and played with.

Nathan

 

[Dwight Elvey]

Hi
Most older machines, like S-100 systems require a separate
terminal.
Dwight

 

[Bungo Pony]

You could probably play BBS door games with it, but the other PC would need to be running the actual game. Not exactly sure how you could set that up since I've never really played with a dumb terminal. Well, actually I have, but that was years ago and I don't really remember anything.

If you have a Best UPS, you can connect it to that and control the entire unit.

 

[Vlad]

You can also control and configure hardware firewalls and router/gateways, which is generally what I use mine for. You could also set up a small Linux box and run CLI only to do things like IRC, text only email or have a dedicated machine for downloading large files.