Blast from the past: Facit A2400 terminal

Comments (2)

cduzz · 3h ago

No escape key? No problem! Ctl-[ to the rescue. If you really want to puzzle the kids let them loose on an old hpux or irix box where # is remapped to backspace and @ is remapped to kill...

That's a lovely terminal; makes me wish I'd held onto my vt220 just to show the kids all the weird things people used to have to put up with. I remember there was something deranged about it's keyboard that I eventually came to not really mind all that much. Eventually I spent years of my life in front of a decstation 3100 and I think I eventually got used to the strange layout.

JdeBP · 1h ago

Did you ever use those settings on an old printer terminal? Visible but unusual punctuation for erase and kill made sense with paper terminals, where back space was as non-destructive as forward space was.

(Amusingly, TianoCore makes BS destructive, and that breaks the spinners displayed by the NetBSD boot loader.)

One other amusing thing is that the LK201 et al. are RS423 at 4800 BPS 8N1, so with suitable voltage-level-converting adapters should be easier to plug in to modern SBC kit than a (non bimodal) PS/2 keyboard is.

Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

Patient Lisp Hacker Seeks Same for Long Walks Through IPL-V Code

Ask HN: What to Do with Old iPads?

High rate of LLM (GPT5) hallucinations in dense stats domains (cricket)

Ask HN: How can I recover and run my old mobile game from the 2010s?

429 Too Many Requests from registry.npmjs.org

Ask HN: Why do people hate on Sabine Hossenfelder so much?

Stop squashing your commits. You're squashing your AI too

How can a mutex in Wine be faster than a native one on Linux

Ask HN: What is wrong with modern software development

Ask HN: Recommandation for an Ergonomic Keyboard?

Ask HN: Someone has committed 20K+ LoC to a PR, exhausting my CI & AI workflows

Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?

Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

Ask HN: How can I trace what user queries make AI bots crawl my site?

Ask HN: Are AI filters becoming stricter than society itself?

Ask HN: I just abandoned my PyCharm subscription, what should I use now?

ASK HN: AI in high school. Will teachers and schools have to compensate?

Ask HN: What is your source for answers?

Ask HN: Devices to allow children to listen to podcasts on my local network?

DSPy GEPA Example: Listwise Reranker

Ask HN: Best Marketplaces for Used Servers?

Ask HN: No easy way for tvOS to display long documents (e.g., terms of service)?

Ask HN: What is the biggest problem LLMs solved in your life/work

Ask HN: How do you find early stage startups to join

Problem with Payment Gateways

Ask HN: Does using public transportation make you more creative than driving?

HeartWatch: A Proactive Child Safety System

Gemini in Gmail Is Pretty Well Useless

Ask HN: Why is Apple so far behind with Siri?

Ask HN: What's Hacker News's vision for the future?

Can you recommend movies like The Social Network?

Ask HN: Is it possible to do great things in STEM in a not so great country?

Ask HN: Non-Smart TV Recommendations?

AI App Dev Log: The Story of Our App Begins

Where is the exponential growth part of AI?

Blast from the past: Facit A2400 terminal

Comments (2)