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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-06-28 07:14:55 +0000, terry+googleblog at tmk.com said:

> 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).

Competing against xterm and PuTTY and other (good) emulators?   
Entering into a market that's rather far from a growth business, and 
with viable free alternatives?  All while taking developers and 
management time from the primary product, OpenVMS?  That'll be an 
entertaining business case to read.

IIRC, VSI has commented that they don't have rights to open-source the 
code, so you'd want to discuss this with HP and maybe Z-Axis.

> 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.

The code will likely work, but there would be some updates necessary 
for a more competitive emulator.  It'd need UTF-8 support and ssh 
communications, for starters.

>> 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.

HP and Z-Axis most likely, though who has what rights?   The DEC VT 
code — no, I don't recall what language it was written in — was already 
ported to Microsoft Windows and to DECterm.



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