[GreenKeys] teletypes and minicomputer emulation - SIMH

[Bryan Brodie]

I think that anyone who would really like to exercise their model 33
or 35 (or any ASCII terminal kit) would find this useful. I have a
Telebyte protocol converter that connects to the 35.

I don't know what would happen with a model 28 - if you can somehow
use those as a computer terminal over an RS232 serial port, it could
also work. (like i said, I'm more software than hardware, certainly
not at the level of you TTY repairmen!)

In addition to showing news and weather, you could show kids how us
geezers used to play blackjack and Star Trek interactively on 70s era
minicomputers. I believe there are some banner and "Snoopy" printing
programs as well.

The thing that struck me as a 13-year-old kid was that you typed stuff
into the Teletype and IT TALKED BACK TO YOU! Timesharing was a
way-cool concept that is lost on today's technologists.

SIMH and the HP2000 system took a little while to configure but I have
a turnkey setup that anyone can drop into a Mac or PC. Once installed,
you access the emulator via "telnet" and your OS.

On a Mac, the problem I had was that the current OS X will not let you
set the port speed below 9600 baud, plus you need a physical serial
port to plug in the hardware. I never got it to work with a serial
card and a Mac Pro tower. I didn't try any USB to serial solutions
because most of what I saw on this list indicated it was problematic.

Under XP on an old Dell server, it worked for me - sort of. An older
version of Heavy Metal supported telnet via Teletype (I still have
that version), but it never worked perfectly. I had to use the PC
keyboard and the TTY printed the output. I couldn't get the TTY
printer and keyboard to work together at the same time, but I am
certain it was a just configuration issue.

Give me a day or two and I'll zip up the required files and post them
in an easily accessible location.

If you're really in a hurry, there's an entire group of folks over on
Yahoo that do this sort of thing. Go here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/hp2000family/ and you can sign up
for their listserv.

HP has placed their OS into the public domain, you just have to agree
not to resell it - the Yahoo folks require you to agree to this before
they will let you sign up and download the basic configuration.

On Feb 12, 2012, at 3:40 PM, Ed Sharpe <couryhouse at aol.com> wrote:

> I meant to ask what mini in high school.  You said 2000 in Jr hs.... I am interested in the 2000 emulator.

We had access to the HP2000F system from 7th through 12th grade - I
believe we started with the 2000E and moved up to the 2000F.

UVA had a maxed out 2000 ACCESS system that could submit batch jobs to
their IBM mainframe (System/360 or 370 - not sure which - we didn't
understand that stuff at the time).