[soft synth music]
[music slowls intensifies]
[terminal turns on]
[beep]
[LGR intro sounds play, music cranks up]
Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing!
And today we’ve got this lovely piece of retro tech, a DEC VT320 terminal.
[power switches on, successful beep]
[keyclick sound]
Yeah beyond those little beeps here and there, the VT320 is pretty much silent.
There are no fans, no hard drive, disk drive, or really any storage at all beyond a bit of RAM.
And that’s because it is... what it is.
A computer terminal, not a personal computer.
Meaning that it relies almost entirely on connecting to another system to do much of
anything at all, either a local host computer or something more remote, like the bulletin
board system being displayed here.
And back when this came out in 1987, Digital Equipment Corporation charged $545 US dollars
for the pleasure, or about $1,200 adjusted for inflation.
Which, despite its later than expected release date, was shockingly good news at the time,
costing 31% less than its VT220 predecessor and hundreds of dollars less than competing
terminals from companies like Wyse and Hewlett-Packard.
And seeing as Digital already dominated the world of computer terminals by 1987, it’s
little wonder the VT320 caught on and became one of the most widely-adopted models of the
late 1980s and on into the 1990s.
That’s speaking from experience too.
In the 90s almost every single library I visited had at least a couple VT320 terminals connected
to the computer card catalog, providing access to the contents of every library branch in
the county and even letting you reserve and renew borrowed items.
A lot of these accessed an integrated library system called Dynix, though I haven’t been
able to verify what exact version I used back then.
It’s been probably sixteen years since I last used one of those terminals at all.
But whatever, I’ve got one now!
And even though I don’t have any card catalogs for this one to peruse, VT320s were frequently
used as library terminals and that’s the biggest reason I wanted one.
In particular, I grabbed this VT320-C2 assembled in August of 1988.
While I don’t know the precise meaning of the C2 suffix, one thing that sets this model
apart is the fact that it doesn’t have an RS-232 serial port.
Instead there’s only these 6-pin DEC-423 ports using MMJ connectors, with the printer
on the left and the communications port on the right.
So you’ve gotta convert things over if you wanna plug in standard serial devices.
Accomplished using something like the DEC H8571-F adapter, which takes a 25-pin serial
device and lets you connect it to the VT320 using an MMJ cable.
But yeah, other than that there’s nothing too strange happening on the terminal itself.
The built-in CRT is a 14-inch monochrome display capable of outputting 80 or 132 columns and
24 rows of text, with the 25th row reserved for displaying a status bar.
And in this case, it uses a vibrant amber phosphor to provide that glowing golden-orange
hue, exactly the same as the library terminals I used as a kid.
Ah it's nice isn't it? It's nice.
Over on the left-hand side of the terminal is the power switch, pretty self-explanatory, that.
Underneath there’s a plastic tilt mechanism with a deceptively strong spring attached,
letting you adjust the screen angle with pleasingly little effort.
And the right-hand side of the unit presents a pair of grayish-brown knobs for brightness
and contrast adjustment, as well as another DEC connector for plugging in the keyboard.
Speaking of keyboards, mine came with this variant of the classic LK201, originally introduced
for Digital’s terminals back in 1982.
It uses the 105-key DEC ANSI Layout, also known as VMS Layout, a common sight with DEC
VT terminals and their clones throughout the 80s.
So common that it had some influence on later PC keyboard configurations.
Things like Caps Lock to the left of the A key, groups of function keys along top of
the board above the number row, and an inverse-T cursor key arrangement
to the bottom-left of the numpad.
All of which differed from most PC keyboards of the early 80s, but was eventually adopted
by a range of manufacturers.
Including IBM with the introduction of the Enhanced Keyboard, better known as the Model M.
Considering there was a Model M terminal board too
I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising.
But back to the LK201, which on closer inspection has an admirably funky set of keys in addition
to the usual stuff.
What exactly these do depends very much on the context of their usage and the system
being accessed though.
There are also four green LED indicators, with ‘hold screen’ signalling a pause
to whatever’s on screen, ‘lock’ for caps lock, ‘compose’ for typing in sequences
of special characters, and ‘wait’ showing that keyboard input is blocked.
And while the keycaps feel pretty decent, it is not a mechanical clicky keyboard.
[clacking of keys]
Instead it uses these cruciform pegs to hold the keys in place and guide them down onto
a membrane underneath.
Pretty robust but not exactly the most pleasant to use.
It does at least generate this cute little keyclick sound,
I’ve always liked that about these things.
[dainty artificial clicking sounds]
Keyboards with speakers make me happy.
Anyway, once everything’s plugged in, all that’s left is to turn it on!
And from here, well, there’s not much you can do yet.
Typing won’t do anything before you take it online, but pressing the setup key on the
keyboard does at least provide a handy handful of menus.
You can do things like adjust the number of on-screen columns, change between light and
dark backgrounds, adjust data transmission speeds and various communication options,
and switch between multiple terminal modes for emulating older DEC terminals and displaying
various character sets.
But yeah, since I can’t connect to a library card catalog anymore, let’s take it online.
And for that I’ll be using this Wifi232 wireless modem, something I’ve covered before
and still enjoy the crap out of honestly.
This plugs into the aforementioned serial adapter and, once powered by USB, emulates
a modem and can be used by pretty much any terminal.
It makes use of Hayes-compatible “AT” commands to communicate using telnet over
wifi, so as long as you have a wireless internet connection
and a BBS to dial into you’re good to go!
Create yourself an account, lurk around the message boards, ogle the lists of door games,
or simply browse the menu system and watch with glee as text pipes in and scrolls upward
with a mesmerizing smoothness.
Yeah that’s another thing I love about these terminals, the smooth scroll option is downright
pleasurable to watch do its thing.
This VT320-C2 may not be able to display all the extended ASCII characters that a lot of
bulletin boards use, but the stand-in characters
still result in a visual style that I love interacting with.
And the fact that some of these boards provide access to external applications,
like Level 29’s Twitter service?
Mm, that’s icing on the amber-tinted cake right there.
Tweeting on a DEC terminal is one of the LGR-est things you can do I think.
And ah dude, don’t even get me started on how it is playing multi-user games on this thing.
Games like Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, Food Fight, and Trade Wars 2002.
The moment I got the terminal online it kicked off a door gaming binge that I was simply
unwilling to quit for a good couple days.
Connecting to a bulletin board system using an actual terminal from the 80s, much less
a DEC VT320 at 2400 baud?
It’s hard to describe how satisfying this is to do in the modern day.
I know there are easier and cheaper methods of emulating such an experience, but this
is just such a specific type of nostalgic nonsense
that completely losing myself in it is a guarantee.
It’s an intoxicating combo of logging into a remote system using this particular keyboard
with this specific terminal, with that glowing amber display and those soft little keyclick
noises emanating from the keyboard speaker.
No doubt this is amplified by my own rose-tinted memories coming back to life, but there is
a kind of retro magic about it.
Optimistically, I’d like to think that it’s just a fun time regardless of past experiences.
I know every time I show this to anyone who’s played Fallout New Vegas they do a double-take
and ask if they can try hacking into a Robco Industries sentry bot or something.
And others are simply amused by its lack of internal drives or removeable storage, or
even an operating system.
And that’s fascinating on its own really, with its reliance on an Intel 8031 microcontroller
and 16 kilobytes of RAM ensuring that anything displayed on the terminal is a only a temporary thing.
The only way to save anything on-screen would be to print it out on paper, otherwise everything
you see scrolls on by, eventually beyond the limits of memory, never to be seen again.
As a result, each activity feels that much more special
and helps ground me in the moment that much more.
But yeah, regardless of how anyone else sees it, I’m more than happy to finally have
a DEC VT320 in my collection and once again taste a few morsels
of childhood library-flavored memories.
As much as I enjoy the convenience of browsing BBSs through modern web browsers, or even
through a terminal emulator on an IBM PC, having a standalone device that exclusively
acts a window to out-of-sight computer systems
is something I cherish more and more as time goes on.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to work on leveling up my death knight skills in LORD.
[CLACK]
[jazzy outro commences]
And if you found this episode terminally enjoyable then great!
I’ve got a bunch of stuff like this on LGR with new videos coming along weekly.
Either way though, thank you very much for watching.