1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

Cool. Can we enter that time portal and live in that alternate reality?

When gasoline was leaded, cigarette smoke was normal everywhere, and asbestos was used for everything you can think of? It is a fascinating decade but also quality of life likely has skyrocketed since.

I mean... Sure? Go buy an actual VT* unit ( maybe https://www.ebay.com/itm/176698465415?_skw=vt+terminal&itmme... ?), get the necessary adaptors to plug into a computer, and run simh on it running your choice of *nix. I recommend https://jstn.tumblr.com/post/8692501831 as a reference. Once you have it working, shove the host machine behind a desk or otherwise out of sight, and you can live like it's 1980.

> quality of life likely has skyrocketed since

it hasn't

it is fascinating to consider that this might not be true even though it seems true

Depends on the specifics of your life.

As a gay man, I’m much happier in 2025.

Ha, I just bought a VT420 a couple of weeks ago. I just finished a hacked together converter for USB keyboards working well enough (in the last hour actually). Next job is to connect it up as a login terminal for my freebsd machine.

Is that an objective truth or rose-tinted nostalgia speaking? (I wouldn't know, I wasn't alive then.)

I love those old terminals! I remember using them during late nights in college...

I survived cancer because of modern medical advances.

I'll take the world with Rituxan and CAR T-cell therapy, thank you.

No? Thinking the world has gotten worse is classic old person chuntering from time immemorial.

Depends on what you value. Purchasing power of wages has declined, for example. That's probably not better.

I suspect the sentiment is more that it would be nice to live in a simpler time, with fewer options, because it would reduce anxiety we all feel about not being able to "keep up" with everything that is going on. Or maybe I'm just projecting.

thinking the world can only get better is another thing too

The only problem with real VTs is you have to be careful not to get one where the CRT has severe burn-in, like in the ebay listing. Sure, some VTs (like the VT240 or VT525) are a separate main box + CRT, but then you're missing the "VT aesthetics". The VT525 is probably the easiest one to get which also uses (old) standard interfaces like VGA for the monitor and PS/2 for the keyboard, so you don't need an original keyboard / CRT. At least for me, severe burn-in, insane prices, and general decay of some of the devices offered on ebay are the reason why I don't have a real VT (yet).

The alternative is to use a decent VT emulator attached to roughly any monitor. By "decent" I certainly don't mean projects like cool-retro-term, but rather something like this, which I started to develop some time ago and which I'm using as my main terminal emulator now: https://github.com/unknown-technologies/vt240

There is firmware available online for some terminals; you could potentially get a lot more accuracy in emulating the actual firmware, but I'm sure a lot of that code gets into the guts of timing CRT cycles and other "real-world" difficulties. I'm not suggesting this would be easy to build out, just pointing out that it's available. While I haven't searched for the VT240 firmware, the firmware for the 8031AH CPU inside the VT420 (and a few other DEC terminals) is available on bitsavers. The VT240 has a T-11 processor, which is actually a PDP-11-on-a-chip.

Actually I have the VT240 firmware ROM dumps, that's where I got the original font from. The problem is, at least the VT240 is a rather sophisticated thing, with a T-11 CPU, some additional MCU, and a graphics accelerator chip. There is an extensive service manual available, with schematics and everything, but properly emulating the whole firmware + all relevant peripherals is non-trivial and a significant amount of work. The result is then a rather slow virtual terminal.

There is a basic and totally incomplete version of a VT240 in MAME though, which is good enough to test certain behavior, but it completely lacks the graphics part, so you can't use it to check graphics behavior like DRCS and so on.

EDIT: I also know for sure that there is a firmware emulation of the VT102 available somewhere.

You can also just use the terminal despite the burn-in.