I didn't realize that the famous VT100 terminal actually had a full 8080 microcontroller.
Has anyone tried adding extra hardware to a VT100 to enable it to run CP/M using the terminal's own 8080 CPU? ;-)
Then again you could add a Raspberry Pi inside it that would emulate most systems of that era faster than the original hardware - not to mention being able to run BSD or Linux natively and fairly capably.
edit: apparently the VT100 has an internal "Standard Terminal Port" connector which you could plug expansion hardware into, like a PDP-8 or CP/M board... or a modern microcontroller board like a Pi or a BeagleBone:
When I was a high school senior in the 1980s I worked for a company making a VT100 clone (it also emulated several other popular terminals) The processor was a 6502. I can't remember how much RAM it had, but it had an 8k ROM.
When I started on the project we were using 12k of EEPROM. The lead developer and I spent about a week optimizing the firmware to reduce the ROM requirements to 8k. For debugging we used logic analyzer traces. Fun times!
I remember that we called this a "smart terminal" because it had so many functions.
It did, the earlier ones like the VT05 (and perhaps the VT50/52) didn't as far as I recall. They had a ton of boards with a whole lot of discrete logic! A bit like the early computers where the 'processor' was not a chip but also several boards with discrete logic chips.
As a result, those earlier terminals are even harder to emulate as there wasn't really much 'firmware' and definitely no standard CPU architecture. However those were pretty barebones anyway in terms of control codes.
I loved the VT05's design though. It looks really star trek. It won't fit on a modern desk because of the depth (all those custom boards take up a ton of space) but it looks so cool.
Has anyone tried adding extra hardware to a VT100 to enable it to run CP/M using the terminal's own 8080 CPU? ;-)
Then again you could add a Raspberry Pi inside it that would emulate most systems of that era faster than the original hardware - not to mention being able to run BSD or Linux natively and fairly capably.
edit: apparently the VT100 has an internal "Standard Terminal Port" connector which you could plug expansion hardware into, like a PDP-8 or CP/M board... or a modern microcontroller board like a Pi or a BeagleBone:
https://www.brendanp.com/vt100-beaglebone-mod/