modern serial terminal

[Ray Arachelian]

M H Stein wrote:
> -----------------
> A moot distinction; what's the difference? If you must have a terminal box
> instead of just running your vintage hardware from the computer on your
> desk, just take an old laptop, remove the (perhaps broken) display, stick a 
> USB or Flash disk in it to boot and run emulation S/W from, plug in your 
> keyboard, display and RS-232 cable and how's that different in any real 
> sense from a fancy terminal? CPU, EEPROM, RAM and I/O; sounds the
> same to me, and probably free...
>
>   

That's exactly what I do.   I've got a couple of old mini notebooks that 
I use as terminals.  They're
worthless for anything else as they're ancient and would only run 
something like win95, so I set'em
up to boot up in Hyperterm.

Now, my main "terminal" is my trusty HP LX200 plamtop, which I use as a 
console for things
like Sun servers when the odd datacenter trip is required by the job.  
It's small, tiny, and is happy
to use 2xAA batteries, and has a built in terminal program, just barely 
a vt102 clone, but good
enough.  (It's also got Lotus123, and quicken for DOS, etc.)  If you 
hunt one of these down
be sure to get a serial cable for it, as they're non-standard.

If you've got some sub/mini notebook around with a serial port, even if 
the batteries are shot, rig
it so it boots into something like Telix, minicom, or hyperterminal, and 
you're set.  No need to
mess with ROMs or what not. 

If you really want to get rid of the hard drive, or if the hard drive is 
dead and beyond replacing,
you could look into replacing it with some sort of flash memory.  Some 
of those will
boot off flash, if they do, you're all set.  Boot up DOS and Telix, and 
rock on, or better yet
throw a mini-linux distro on there and fire up minicom - no need for XWin.

If you must, you can boot Linux from a disk-on-chip. 
See: http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8844506693.html

For DOS Telix see, but it's expensive, as compared with a mini-linux 
distro with minicom + lrzsz.
see: http://www.telix.com/delta/deltacom/tfd/index.html