suddenly remembering the early days of seeing VT220 terminals showing up in public libraries for electronic card catalog use and realizing I could telnet out from them and explore the pre-web internet without them being any the wiser so long as I switched back to the card catalog screen if anyone was walking behind me
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@freakazoid it was a unix machine somewhere in the back offices - if you ctrl+f2’ed or something you’d get another tty and it was autologin to the catalog user account but that account still had telnet so off you could go lol
@freakazoid got banned from a high school library because I’d set one of the VT220s to be in french when I was prepping for a french exam and I forgot to switch it back before I left to go to class and they had no idea how to get into any of the terminal’s settings to switch it back until they got me between classes to come fix it haha, I loved the terminal era
@djsundog I used a dumb (as in no cursor movement controls) terminal a friend had dumpster dived for BBSing for a while, and I used to play on the terminals at IBM when he'd bring me to work with him, but that's about the extent of my exposure to them. I kinda want one, but they tend to be overpriced and not come with keyboards.
@djsundog Was it attached to a terminal server or a UNIX machine or what?