well that sure is extremely rare (Patreon)

I just got back from a week in California visiting my parents; not much else to report from that trip, except this extremely rare acquisition.

Almost a year ago I bumped into someone who was interested in a robot I had, a Heathkit HERO-1. I'll post more about that later, but while discussing said robot and what he might be willing to trade for it, this came up: A DEC VT180.

I'll admit that I don't have much concrete info on this thing yet, I just got it and haven't dug into the history, but knowing what it was I couldn't turn it down. It is, simply put, a DEC VT100 - the 1978 smart terminal that continues to define how textmode interfaces work to this day - with a built-in SBC, so it can function as a self contained computer.

This seems wild until you realize that DEC actually designed the VT100 with this in mind; it has an internal card cage with pins for interfacing directly with the terminal, and they leveraged this pretty much immediately. As early as 1979 they were selling the VT103, a terminal preloaded with a single-chip PDP-11 equivalent and a pair of DECtape drives mounted under the monitor (!) but a couple years later, in 82, they decided to put this thing together.

The VT180 consists of the VT100 plus a VT18X addon card, on which lives a Z80 CPU, 64K of RAM, 8KB of firmware, a floppy drive controller, and serial/parallel interfaces. With this installed, the machine POSTs into this cute little ROM menu allowing you to boot it from one of four supported FDDs (two come stock), or drop into terminal mode, which ostensibly makes it behave as a standard VT100. If you chose to boot from disk, this being a Z80 in 1982, the given OS was CP/M - and I don't have pics of that running, but it pretty much always looks the same, which was kind of the point.

I touched on this some a few posts back when I talked about that S100 machine I got, but in short: prior to the massive success of the PC, the S100 ecosystem and CP/M was the largest example of a platform where many vendors made distinct machines that could all run the same software, I think without modification. I believe you could take the same copy of Wordstar and run it on an Altair 8800, a Cromemco, or this thing.

What's intriguing about that however is that, by and large, CP/M machines didn't have their own displays. There were exceptions, especially the portable systems like the Kaypros, but usually you were buying a box with a card backplane, and then plugging it into a terminal over a serial cable. I'm sure most people using CP/M for personal computing used the cheapest terminals they could get, but you could reasonably have used a VT100, and this machine is interesting simply because it skips a step.

There is absolutely no functional difference between the VT180, and a Cromemco (with typical card loadout) plugged into a VT100. It's literally just an internal serial connection, there is no larger integration between the two devices. And I have to admit, it really tickles me that there was a point in history where that made sense.

Just a year later, with the stratospheric success of the PC and it's variety of graphics modes and vast array of expansion cards, I think the idea of a machine with a serial port as it's sole human interface would have seemed absurd. I know the S100 platform lived on through much of the eighties nonetheless, but it definitely wasn't state of the art anymore. 82, I think, is pretty much the last year when you could get away with marketing something like the VT180 at all.

Of course, this assumes anyone who bought it was an actual consumer. While I think the followup machine (the Rainbow) probably was trying to target consumers, I'm not sure this one was; cursory googling suggests the VT100 itself was in the neighborhood of $8K (adjusted for inflation) and with the 180 card I'm sure that was closer to $10K. You could absolutely do much better than that for a home system, since you didn't need most of the VTs conveniences or capabilities or the DEC name.

So I think more likely DEC was imagining this appealing to a small set - say, academics who wanted to be able to switch between working on the university's big timeshare machine and doing smaller projects local to their system. For them, the cost and limitations (no expandability) might not have mattered versus the value of saving space and having a nice high end terminal with smooth scrolling that could also talk to their mainframe. Speculation, of course, but it seems like it'd make sense.

Anyway, here's what it all means to me:

First off, I now have a VT100. There aren't a lot of computing devices that make me feel starstruck, but c'mon, this thing is in our blood. I own a 5150 (and 60) so I already have some historically vital stuff, but if there's another Heritage Device this would have to be it. Anyone who's touched Linux for more than a day has felt the impact of this terminal's design and functionality, so it's very difficult not to feel a little awe around that.

But besides that, it's also absolutely pristine.

This thing came to me in the original box; the box is a little beat up (clearly in a house with a cat...) but looks the part, and has all the parts packed in the original foam. The keyboard is fully intact, the case is basically spotless, and when we open it up...

There is not a SPECK of dust inside other than, like, what drifted in from the packing material. Nothing is static-clung to the tube or chassis board, so I have no doubt that this thing was never used. I know the previous owner fired it up to test it but other than that, I think this just sat in the box.

Who the hell has a new in box VT100? And how is that person me?

This is a fantasy you hear about on a forum in 2002: "oh yeah some local computer store had a stack of them, I got one for $100, sealed." It's the kind of tale that makes you sigh and wonder why you even bother because you'll never come across a find like that, and it's even worse nowadays - all the low-hanging and medium-hanging fruit is picked, those days are long behind us, etc. etc. And yet here I sit with this thing in my possession. How could it happen? I have no idea, and the previous owner also has no idea, he just got it from someone else years ago.

I didn't write this post to brag - I mean, yes, I'm thrilled, but the point is more along the lines of: Don't give up on your dreams. It took 20 years for something like this to fall in my lap, but I didn't get it through youtube clout, I just bumped into another retro enthusiast and it happened to come up. So by keeping myself in circulation and continuing to network with people, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to get a shot at owning this, and chances are I won't be keeping it forever, so sooner or later someone else will probably get to be incredibly lucky. Don't stop believing.

With all that said, it's worth noting that it doesn't currently work - but I'm not too worried about that. The previous owner says it booted when he tested it before selling it to me (that's where the pic of the menu is from,) but while running CP/M the screen suddenly vertical-collapsed. That's typically just bad caps though, and reportedly is especially true with this thing, so I have no doubt a recap will fix it, and fortunately the chassis board is, uh...

...not too complex. That's the cap diagram I made up for it, since nobody else online seems to have a VT with this particular chassis board. Notice the one in the center, the 75uF 6V? Reportedly DEC underrated that and you should replace it with a higher-voltage part, which I'm doing, but the funny thing about that is: All the other caps cost between $0.35 and $0.75, with the big nonpolarized guy at the top of the list. That 75uF axial cap? $8.45. I have absolutely no idea why it's that expensive, but since Digikey only had 3 options, I suspect it's just that nobody wants that value anymore for some reason.

The caps will arrive tomorrow and I'll replace everything right away, and assuming that fixes it, I expect this'll be my next video. Any input on the VT100 or relatives is of course invited!