The year is (roughly) 1989, and we have a small office with some Unix computers and a handful of Facit A2400 terminals connected to them. What we love most about these terminals is they are positive terminals with black text on a white background. We “grew up” with green on black and, later at Nixdorf Computer AG, with amber on black.
Young readers might be surprised we used to get printed manuals with our terminals (and computers); don’t forget, the Web didn’t exist then, and “download the manual as PDF” hadn’t yet been invented.
I spent untold and countless hours developing a special curses library (dubbed “Ecurses”) with special input functions etc. for customers whom we also recommended these terminals to.
When we gave up that office, I took two or three of the terminals along, even a brand new one which, stupidly, I dumped at recycling many years later. Only one of the Facits permanently in use survived; the dirty case and the old Duesseldorf zip code on the service sticker are proof.
The year is now (exactly) 2025, and Martin S. of the Linuxhotel has the idea of setting up an “old” terminal to show trainees in Unix beginner courses what our life was once like. I tell him the story of the Facits and promise to bring one along to lend to him.
Obviously I’m not going to schlepp this very heavy terminal to Essen just to determine it no longer works, so I configure a Shuttle PC with OpenBSD and set up com0 as the console at 19200 baud; the Facit can do double that, but I thought this would be a compromise between “speed” and “seeing slowish output” for noobs.
% cat /etc/boot.conf stty com0 19200 set tty com0 % grep tty00 /etc/ttys tty00 "/usr/libexec/getty std.19200" vt220 on secure
The most difficult part of the whole operation was finding the correct cable, obviously. I used to be inundated in cables but got rid of most many years ago. Luckily a trip to the cellar uncovered the needed combination, so I booted up.
Astute readers will notice there’s no ESCape key on the keyboard, but it can be mapped to the compose key:
I have decided to make this a permanent loan to the lovely people at the Linuxhotel and very much hope younger generations will have the opportunity of experiencing what we used to work with.