Hi, I like period correct hardware terminals for authentic immersion feels and have been tending to RSX (and UNIX) PDP-11s since my teen years, quite a long time now. I keep them in my living room and den, etc. Convincing setups that quite look the part. And actually *are* the part; running much as though it’s still 1986. Very little emulation “cheating.” Real SMD disks, even, sometimes.
Anyway, one of the many fun things I do with them is chat rooms. People are like, “you connected here on a WHAT?” In doing this I find myself often chastised by my esteemed Internet colleagues for using such “horrible” computers because “That’s the worst possible computer you could pick” (real quote, minus some aspersions about power consumption) and “what loser can’t scroll up and look through chat that’s more than 24 lines back?!?” I try to ignore all this in the name of “progress,” but, I mean, they have a point. As much as I’m having a nice time with all this, it does hurt quite enough already for all the other obvious reasons and then I CAN’T SCROLL BACK?!? Come on. When you think about it retrospectively, this _is_ actually kind of bad, right? So What? Quit the real terminal and computer and use a modern laptop? Hell no. It strikes me that scrollback is a silly thing to condemn such a storied lineage of computers over, but that’s exactly what’s happening in this contemporary vale of tears. My friends think PDP-11s suck because they can’t scroll (and, yes, perhaps some other things). So I say let’s write a scrolling “terminal” program for RSX. Should work with serial and telnet (BQT stuff) and DECnet (i.e. $SET HOST XXXXXX). Actually maybe it doesn’t even have to know about that layer, right? (Thinking as I write this). Spawn whatever command and it buffers the output such that you can effortlessly scroll back up through stuff that has scrolled past. Something terribly rudimentary, perhaps, but with at least infinite scrollback. Like just a dumb scroll back buffer wrapper thing. Writes to / reads from disk as you accrue characters / cursor up. Heck, this would have been a boon in the day for normal use, right? Like having a glass tty and a real paper printing terminal all in one! I can scarcely believe it doesn’t already exist. Would you folks be into helping with it? If not, I’ll try myself. Did a bit of this sort of work some decades ago writing a disk imager under RSX in MACRO-11 using QIO$ calls, looked up fresh from the orange binders sitting there on the couch. Pretty easy. Should we take from screen or tmux? Or do a clean room concept, you think? I hope it can work under RSX and UNIX. RSTS/e, too, anyone? RT? If you have opinions about this or if it already exists, let me know, pls. thx jake
