[Info-vax] Last Call for (New) DEC VT Terminals

[terry+googleblog at tmk.com]

On Saturday, June 27, 2015 at 12:37:13 PM UTC-4, JF Mezei wrote:
> Cue VSI who have the source code for DECterm. They should open source or
> commercialise it and make it available on Linux, OS-X etc to compete
> against xterm. (imagine if it were available on App Store for OS-X, VSI
> could make money from it).

As has been mentioned, it is old code and I wouldn't even expect it to compile / run on a modern Linux, etc, system. So there would likely be a lot of work to simply get it to work as well as it does now.

"Incentivizing" another vendor to update that vendor's existing product would probably be better. Attachmate Reflection might be a place to start, although they've apparently given up caring about emulating VT's - LK4xx support doesn't work properly in Reflection 14.1 under Windows 7 (they haven't actually shipped a LK4xx driver/map for a few versions before that) and they said that updating to Reflection 20xx wouldn't be worth it as they didn't do anything better for VT's there (at the time I had a site license and could switch with no cost).

> Out of curiosity, who would have the source code for the VT220/VT320
> terminals ? In what language was it written ?

You won't care. "Real" terminal firmware was designed to talk to specific hardware (the 6845 display controller was a common choice). It normally isn't layered into "terminal emulation" and "hardware", so it would be hard to separate out. You'd be better off emulating the firmware and the display hardware in something like MAME/MESS.

Of the top of my head, for DEC-compatible (at least at the VT52 level) terminals that I had source code licenses for:

Volker-Craig VC4404 - assembler (the predecessor 404 was hardwired logic)
Ann Arbor Ambassador - assembler
Visual 50 - I seem to remember it was some flavor of C, but it was built on a cross-compiler that ran under Data General AOS

And, for bizarre completeness:

DCA IRMA stuff - 8086 assembler (user side), 8X305 "assembler" (3270 side) for the IRMA PC card versions, 8080 assembler + 8X305 for the standalone (serial) boxes like IRMAline/IRMAprint.