A procession of glass terminals
Did you ever want an ASR 33? Come on, every geek who is old enough dreamed of having one of those, complete with a homebrew interface and the oil spot on the floor. I almost had one, once; it was stored in someone’s garage and I wasn’t strong enough to carry it all the way home. Shortly afterward, I saw my first “glass terminal”, and my life changed forever.
I built a kit, and bought a modem, and had a friend convert a cheap 13-inch B&W TV that was AC/DC so that I could have one of my own. Not as snazzy as a VT-100, but every bit as useful for reading text screens. And life progressed.
Here we are, close to three decades later, and I’ve done it again. I bought a new “glass terminal”, even if this one has a huge matrix of LCDs and displays many colours in the right order, quickly. Truth be told, it was an impulse purchase. We had gone out to the Subway (to have a sandwich; around here, rapid transit is a generation or two behind) and stopped into a local computer store, sandwiched between a pizza place and yet another sushi place (that also sells pizza)
We convinced the guy that he should sell us one of those new-fangled flat screens that isn’t a TV. After all, the price was right, and we had a car to get it home, which is a step up from not carrying the ASR33 anyplace. Home we went, and the screen was immediately absorbed into the matrix (quagmire) of the World of Warcraft. Son #1 actually stepped aside long enough for us to swap screens. He can fly now, in passing…
I was happily poorer, because now we had an “extra glass terminal” so that I could resurrect one of my Macs from the basement. No matter that the screen had been drooling on one side. Except. It. Died. Between being unplugged and carried downstairs, it stopped working. DOA. Thank goodness I had the foresight to buy a new screen today.
