[GreenKeys] A portable Baudot terminal

[Steve Schlink]

Jim,

Another alternative, depending on price and availability, is a 3M Whisper 
Writer.

They are a very compact thermal printing (based on the Apple/Trendcom 
printer) terminal.

Available in Baudot (32TTY replacement) , ASCII (33TTY replacement) and a 
serial printer, w/o keyboard.

Here is a representative example, albeit rather expensive:

<http://www.ebay.com/itm/200869015748>

Take care,

Steve

At 04:29 PM 1/24/2013 -0600, Jim Haynes wrote:
>Sometimes I've wished for a portable Baudot terminal to use in testing
>TTY gear.
>
>I have an old Dell C610 laptop and those are dirt cheap on ebay, and have 
>a COM port.  There are some old DOS programs that make a PC into a "glass 
>TTY" and are still available.  One I have used is called rtty12g - you can 
>google for it.
>
>Now the trouble is that the laptop has Windows XP, and while rtty12g will
>run under Windows XP it doesn't do the right thing.  Specifically it
>doesn't set the UART to 5 bit characters; it sets the baud rate correctly
>but sends 8 bit characters.  I guess in DOS the program can poke the
>UART registers directly to get the desired properties.
>
>So one solution would be if someone knows how to set the UART to 5 bits
>in Windows XP and later.
>
>A rather grubby way I have working now is that I have a floppy drive on
>the laptop.  I formatted a floppy on a Win98 machine, then copied the
>rtty12g files to it, and boot from the floppy.  This works, but I wouldn't
>suggest to anybody to go through that process.
>
>Another possibility is to create a partition on the hard drive in the
>laptop and install FreeDOS and rtty12g.  Right now I don't know enough
>about how to install just enough of FreeDOS and make it bootable along
>with the other stuff on the laptop (WinXP and Linux).  I'm assuming
>FreeDOS would let the program do what it wants to do to the hardware
>registers.
>
>Jim W6JVE
>
>jhhaynes at earthlink dot net
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