{"id":1211,"date":"2021-01-24T22:11:04","date_gmt":"2021-01-24T22:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/?page_id=1211"},"modified":"2021-01-24T22:11:04","modified_gmt":"2021-01-24T22:11:04","slug":"vt105","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/pdp-11\/minc\/vt105\/","title":{"rendered":"VT105"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-1024x630.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1212\" srcset=\"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-1024x630.png 1024w, https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-300x184.png 300w, https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-768x472.png 768w, https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-1200x738.png 1200w, https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33-600x369.png 600w, https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/Screenshot-2021-01-24-at-22.46.33.png 1340w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>VT105 &#8211; the graphical terminal for MINC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The most important part of a MINC system for sure &#8211; the vt105 graphical terminal. Graphical as in wave form graphics &#8211; another of those bits of IT history that existed only for a brief period in time, when memory cost was so high that the bitmap based graphics we now take for granted would have been prohibitively expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With its limited storage, vt105 is surprisingly capable, and the combination of graph lines, markers, and shade lines makes for graphs that can be compelling even by today&#8217;s standards. And current systems with their abstraction layers between program and hardware might even struggle to show shaded strip charts like the vt105 can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Information sources<\/strong><br>Information about the vt105 is mostly from the EK-VT105-TM-001 manual (as found on Bitsavers) and confirmed by running the ZVTN maindec and the examples from MINC-11 Book 4: MINC Graphic Programming. Also, the base vt100 behaviour of the terminal has been confirmed by vttest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Unknown\/Missing information<\/strong><br>None currently identified.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Implementation status<\/strong><br>The implementation has been verified to all examples in the MINC-11 Book 4: MINC Graphic Programming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The current implementation only enables the square graph form as described in EK-VT105-TM-001. Since in the software that is available at this point only the square form is used, it doesn&#8217;t seem urgent to also implement the rectangular format. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some of the base vt functionality has not been implemented:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>132  column mode; to add this would be quite complex because it would require a different font &#8211; and that would not likely look good at a 640&#215;480 resolution. Of course I could use a higher resolution, but that would then add even more complexity and also require a lot more FPGA resources.<\/li><li>inverted screen background, ie. dark letters on a bright background; this would be very easy to add, but I suspect it would look horrible &#8211; I never used it back in the day for this reason.<\/li><li>soft scrolling; adding would not be trivial but still quite doable, but similar to the inverted background, I never used it back in the day &#8211; why slow down a system that isn&#8217;t very fast in the first place.<\/li><li>hard copy; I&#8217;d like to add this, but not sure how it should work yet. Saving a bitmap somewhere seems to make the most sense, but where. Maybe a separate sd card interface for the terminal.<\/li><li>keyboard settings &#8211; like, setting the repeat rate, the leds for caps lock and scroll lock; this should be added at some point, it&#8217;s not that difficult to do &#8211; but it would require a change to the ps2 component to allow it to write to the keyboard.<\/li><li>the BREAK signal &#8211; both transmitting and receiving; shouldn&#8217;t be difficult except I&#8217;m not sure how to test it yet. On the original MINC it would serve to break to odt, but the pdp2011 don&#8217;t have that at the moment.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Note that since the May 30, 2021 update, the vt has been updated to support automatic XOFF\/XON, and double width\/double height characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most important part of a MINC system for sure &#8211; the vt105 graphical terminal. Graphical as in wave form graphics &#8211; another of those bits of IT history that existed only for a brief period in time, when memory cost was so high that the bitmap based graphics we now take for granted would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":988,"menu_order":200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1211","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","missing-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1211\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdp2011.sytse.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}