Hey HN! I'm Suraj, one of the authors of this blog post. Andy (@acarl005) and I came up with the idea to write this post when we realized there weren't many existing resources on how a terminal works under the hood, end-to-end. If folks find this useful, we'd be happy to turn this into a series and dive deeper into sub-topics. Let us know what you think :)
> ASCII text would be transmitted character-by-character over the wire as the user typed.<p>How does that work exactly on a lower level, say the current? ASCII text would be decoded to the binary and 1s would be high voltage and 0s would be low? And if there's no data transmitted it would be all low voltage?
One thing that is missing is the termcap/terminfo system. For funsies, you can try to run your session with TERM=dumb to get a retro experience :)
That article starts with too many inaccuracies to recommend it to anybody:
- Teletypes were designed about a century before the era of mainframes.
- Mechanical teletype did not have an "I/O driver" in it.
- OS on Mainframe computers did not have a "Kernel", and neither "I/O driver", "Line discipline" or "TTY driver". This model was introduced with UNIX, the OS that ran on minicomputers.
- Was ChatGPT used to write this article? ;)<p>I've recently stumbled upon an article on the same topic, but containing competent and accurate information, I have a link because I recommended it to a friend: <a href="https://thevaluable.dev/guide-terminal-shell-console/" rel="nofollow">https://thevaluable.dev/guide-terminal-shell-console/</a>