Purely historic question: VT200 text graphic programming

[Martin Gregorie]

On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:52:13 +0000, Jorgen Grahn wrote:

> On Thu, 2011-03-10, Martin Gregorie wrote:
>> On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:31:11 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>
>>> You tricked me by saying only DEC VAX/VMS programmers would know what
>>> it was.  In fact, many, many Unix programmers knew about curses (and
>>> still do) and very few VMS programmers ever did.  C wasn't very widely
>>> used under VMS, and VMS had it's own screen formatting and form
>>> handling libraries.
>>>
>> From the context the "only DEC VAX/VMS programmers" remark applied to
>> the VT-100. However, the OP is wrong about that - VT-100s were
>> well-known and popular devices in the 8-bit microprocessor world too,
>> together with assorted clones. In addition, many other terminals had a
>> VT-100 emulation mode. IIRC all the Wyse terminals had that.
> 
> But he wrote VT-200, not VT-100. I assumed he meant those (vt200) had
> some exotic graphics mode. The VT-xxx series was pretty heterogenous,
> although most of us think of them as more or less fancy VT-100s.
>
You're right - he did say VT-200. Can't remember using one. However, I 
did buy a used VT-103 at some point and dumped it fairly rapidly as it 
had no manuals and I couldn't get it to work as a terminal (no wonder - 
I've since found out that it was really a standalone box with an LSI-11/23 
crammed into the VT-100 box). It got swapped for a Wyse 120 - an 
excellent terminal with a white phosphor rather than green. 

Grayshark was right too: the ANSI control code standard preceded the 
VT-100 - I live and learn - and because of that there was no commonality 
between VT-50/52 and VT-100 escape codes. Details here:
http://vt100.net/vt_history

BTW, there was no such thing as a VT-200 - there was a VT-220 text 
terminal (which I think the OP was remembering) and the VT-240 and 241 
terminals, which were totally different graphics terminals that accepted 
Tektronics  graphics commands: comparing a VT-220 to a VT-240/241 would 
be like comparing an Epson dot-matric printer to an HP 7485 plotter!


-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |