Apr 18, 2020 15:00:00

A movie that makes a typewriter made in 1930 be a Linux terminal screen and drives ASCII art

Typewriters , which allow you to type letters on paper by tapping the dial, were widely used in business from the 19th century to the 20th century. A movie that uses such a typewriter as a terminal screen of Linux is published on YouTube by Curious Marc who is doing restoration of a vintage computer.

Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal-YouTube

Mr. Curious Marc uses the typewriter of the model number 'TG-7-B' as the terminal screen

It appeared in 1930 and was used for communication in the military until the 1960s.

Characters entered with 'TG-7-B' are encoded into a 5-bit

Baudot code ...

The encoded characters are decoded by the electromagnet and printed on paper.

CuriousMarc first decided to create a mechanism to send characters from a computer to a typewriter. Consider how to mount transistors and resistors from the typewriter materials.

Electronic components mounted on a

breadboard . A computer is connected to the 'REC' side and a typewriter is connected to the 'SEND' side.

Connect the serial data generator 'HP 8018A' to the REC side and check the operation.

When you send a signal to a typewriter ...

The characters have been printed.

Curious Marc uses

Arduino as a computer that controls the input and output of characters.

Since it is necessary to convert the 8-bit signal input as ASCII code to a 5-bit Baudot code signal and output it, Curious Marc who uses Eclipse to program the Arduino.

Put the breadboard and programmed Arduino in the case, and attach the switches ...

A box that can use a typewriter as a terminal is completed.

Also, since the typewriter supports only uppercase letters, Mr. Curious Marc says that he is able to detect terminals with only uppercase letters using

agetty , which is a control program for virtual terminals.

Using agetty to connect a typewriter as a terminal to the Arduino serial port '/ dev / ttyS0' ...

The login screen is displayed on the typewriter.

When I tried to login immediately, I received an error and could not login.

'Do you need sudo!', Says Curious Marc. Apparently it was necessary to have administrator privileges to execute agetty. If you add sudo to the beginning of the command and execute agetty ...