The Emulator

Back to cv or to Home Page

My first real coding was on the DOS PEP/STEP Emulator. Initially it supported UTS 20 terminal emulation, connecting to a Sperry Univac (Unisys) mainframe, and VT52 connecting to a VAX or Unix machine, but quickly expanded to UT 40 (colour) and UTS 60 (graphics) on the mainframe side, and VT100, VT102 and VT220 on the workstation side. 

These were cabled networks, usually 24-pin RS-232. Some of the terminal clusters had multiplexors, and bidding for the line was using the RTS line, so some 5-7 wires were really required. The VAX/Unix machines quickly understood that is too many wires, and used the tiny, at that epoc, 9-pin connector.

The joining with a west coast emulation company added the Burroughs (Unisys) A-Series terminal emulation, like B24, B26. And with another a lot of refinements on the above emulation series, but they also added OS/2 support, which was moving fast into the business world. The PC that could emulate many network terminals was born.

Our fairly properous terminal emulation company was sold to a larger company group doing IBM 3270, 5250 emulation. The OS grew, changed, evolved, but what does a little terminal want to do? It wants to be able to connect to everybody, by trying to speak, oops, I mean emulate, the hosts method of communication.

From very early on I wanted to call it an "Intellegent Terminal". It was a PC, with all the tools that meant you had, but it could also connect to some of the most important networks in the world, at that time. As the price of the PC fell, it quickly took all the business worlds new network clusters positions, and that brought the price down more, and the popular PC was born.

Back to cv or to Home Page

Browsing recently to understand a problem I was having ssh I found around 'tucows.matrix.com.br/ssh95.html'

<quote>
ZOC Terminal Emulator 4.05, Date: March 9th, 2002 License: Shareware
Size: 1.2MB Rating: Cost: $69.00 Evaluation: 30 days
Information:
This Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH) and ISDN communication application offers features
rarely found even in even commercial packages.
The following emulations are included:
ANSI, CEPT, Linux, QNX 4, SunCDE, TTY, TVI 9xx,
VT52, AVATAR, VT100, VT102, VT220, IBM 3270,
and Secure Shell (SSH).
Included file transfer protocols are:
ASCII, X/Y/Z-Modem, Kermit, and CompuServe-B.
It also includes ISDN support for CAPI V1.1
(OS/2 only) and CAPI V2.0 boards including X.25 and X.31.
</quote>

showing Emulators are still out there today.

Back to cv or to Home Page