A bit of necessity plus a lot of free time equals…

I was BSing with some friends and somehow we eneded up on the topic of the old HP Terminals that used to be used out at Napa Valley College and some of the unusual stuff Chris had done with them.

A bit of necessity plus a lot of free time equals…
…Anyways, since I was doing so much terminal access from both on and off campus I was becoming frustrated with only having one shell in front of me. I also wanted to do something cool with the touch screen on the HP 150s. And so ttykit was born.

ttykit is my suite of software that creates an entire text-based menu and window system on a text screen terminal. There’s an Object-Oriented library made in Objective-C that’s modeled very closely after the NeXTSTEP 3 API, a standalone windowserver that is PostScript-like and actually can draw lines using ascii (even diagonal by stair-stepping!), and the only application I ever wrote that uses ttykit, Roboterm. Roboterm is mostly just a simple Terminal.app type program.

And he goes on from there even releasing the stuff he wrote under the GPL. But one thing he also did was hook up an old terminal and show what the kit did. Click to read more and watch the video.

Tags: Hardware, Software, Technology