Pick and Liberty terminals

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Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 14:17:12 -0700
From: David Lawyer <dave*lafn.org>
To: Pickle <pickle*alien.net.au>
Cc: "Richard Shuford"
Subject: Re: Linux terminal how-to

Thanks for the info.  I don't have room in my HOWTO for any info on
the Liberty terminals.  But I think that it belongs on Shuford's
website on text-terminals.  Is it OK for him to keep it there?

I'll put a little of the Wyse info into my HOWTO but perhaps the Wyse
info here also belongs on Shuford's website.

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On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 10:40:39PM +1000, Pickle (Simon Butcher) wrote:


David,

 I have some information you might be interested in...

 A few years ago I came across a fellow who had a garage full of terminals.
I arrived to buy what I thought was one terminal for $2. I ended up paying
$50 for around 45 terminals. One of them included a VT220, with an
unfortunate problem involving a large black burnt out hole around 2cm (just
under an inch) in the circuit board. It obviously wasn't going anywhere.

 I also got a WYSE 370 from 1990 (colour, but from my tests no graphics
capabilities, and soft-fonts didn't work). The WYSE 370 has a very confusing
half backwards menu system like the WYSE 150 you described in the Appendix
of the HOW-TO. It has two serial ports and allows multi-paging and split
screen (halves, vertical and horizontal) capabilities.

 Along with two WYSE 60's, and a WYSE 50, I picked up about 15 WYSE 85's..
The WYSE 50 was the most annoying thing to set up.. And I had read that they
were prone to not lasting very long in a newsgroup somewhere. Sure enough,
before I had a chance to open it up and fix it before it killed itself off..
It died, in a wonderful show of a bright light and plenty of blue/grey
smoke. Unfortunately I can't tell you much about it because it only lasted
about 30 minutes, but I can tell you about the WYSE 85's.

 To setup the WYSE 85, you press F3. Options are listed down the bottom, and
it's pretty much straight forward. You move left/right to select a menu
option, then press SPACE (dispite it saying "press enter" at the top of the
screen). You can also scroll through the setup pages by pressing up and
down, and if you ever get lost, pressing F3 will take you to the top without
loosing any of the settings. It's a typical WYSE maze :)

 The WYSE 85 mainly seems to be a VT52/VT100/VT200 emualtor, since the mode
settings don't seem to include WYSE. The WYSE 370 can emulate the whole VT
set, along with WY60, and WY150. They're bizarre beasts. The WYSE 85 has the
20mA port as well as a printer and serial port. My WYSE 85's has a label
that says the fuse should be 1A. A one amp fuse constantly blows, so I've
assumed that it's a one amp fuse for 110/120volt, except in Australia we use
a 240 volt system, so maybe there was a mislabeling.. People might want to
be aware of that :)

 Now onto the rest of them. A truck load of "Liberty" brand terminals. I
love these things, apart from the fact that half of these have faults
somewhere, and apart from the a handful of logic boards being faulty, they
seem pretty good. I've asked around, and nobody seems to have heard of these
terminals ever before! That surprises me; have you heard of them?

 The "Liberty 120" terminals age from mid-1992, made by Liberty-Electronics
in San Francisco have a serial port and a parallel port. They're very basic,
and designed similar to the WYSE 85's. From what I can tell, they were
internationally released, and emulated many terminal types. Because of this,
there are some confusing things to the Liberty terminals, and still several
things I don't know about.

 I've tested them for all the graphic formats I know of, and nothing works.
They don't respond to any soft-font commands either. It can emulate VT-52,
VT-100, VT-200, VT-300, Freedom ONE, TeleVideo 950, TeleVideo 925, Lear
Siegler ADM 31, ADDS Viewpoint A2, Dumb Terminal/PC Terminal, WYSE 50, WYSE
60, WYSE 120, WYSE 150. The WYSE emulations are not complete, and I haven't
been able to test anything else other than the VT specifications, which seem
complete except for the escape codes that DEC didn't tell anyone about, and
since I don't know any of them I can't tell you if even they work or not.

 Keyboard setup is dependant on the emulation settings, and so are the
options in the setup menus as well, so that should always be set up first.
In the VT modes, Pressing control-escape brings you into a "simple" setup
mode, where the options are all on a single simple line down the bottom of
the screen. Pressing Shift-Escape takes you into a larger full-screen setup
on several pages.

 In any other modes, pressing scroll lock will open the simple setup system,
pressing shift-scroll lock will bring up the full-screen setup system.
Shift-break resets the system. If you ever get completely stuck, you can
open up the bottom and on the circuit board there is a little button-battery
(like in a watch) that holds the settings. If you take that out for about 15
minutes, the terminal will be completely reset.

 In the full-screen setup mode, there are some additional functions you can
access. Since I don't have the documentation, and Liberty-Electronics
haven't replied with any help, I can't be sure. One day my cat sat on my
keyboard while I was in setup mode one day. Something happened and the
terminal reset. I tried to continue my setup-session, but I kept being asked
for a password, and I could never work out ever again how to get in to set a
password! That required removal of the battery...

 There is one function I'm confident about. It's a full screen and keyboard
test. This helps aligning the screen if you're into fiddling with the
trimpots in the back of the video section of the terminal. Before you start
this function, be warned.. You have to remove the battery to stop the
terminal from forever testing itself! The test doesn't stop, and cannot be
stopped by pressing a key combination (AFAIK). To access it, get into the
full-screen setup mode, then press shift-F1. There is another test
accessible via shift-F2.

 Well, I hope this slab of information helps someone out there.. These
terminals are fantastic and have been the easiest for us to use with Linux.

Cheers!

Simon Butcher
Alien Internet Services
http://www.alien.net.au/


			David Lawyer

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