Hooking Up an Old Serial Terminal on NetBSD

I recently got an old Wyse WY-55 terminal hooked up to my NetBSD machine using a USB serial adapter, and I documented the process. I had never set up a "dumb" terminal before so it was a learning experience. Turns out, once I figured out what I was doing, getting NetBSD to communicate with the terminal amounted to adding one line to a text file. Hooray for man pages and text-based configuration! My write up is here:

gemini://tilde.club/~nightheron/tech/terminal-netbsd.gmi

2024-11-29 · 1 year ago · 👍 gritty, Hein, MrSVCD, jutty

4 Comments ↓

I am always envious of the old terminals... Someday I will get one...

same here. I can see the look on my wife's face already.

I did something like this with an old Tandy model 200, a "laptop" that runs a slimmed OS out of ROM and is powered by two AA batteries. I think it's an incredible thing to be able to do. VT-100 emulation is a luxury on this old hardware.

There is something magical about the giant all-in-one terminals...The roundness, the colors, the real mechanical keyboard...