Tektronix 4010 Emulator

This is a Tektronix 4010 terminal emulator for the Raspberry Pi.

It attempts to emulate the storage tube display of the 4010, including the bright drawing spot. At the moment, it only supports persistent drawing, but there are plans to emulate the 4014 with its ability for fading objects.

It is currently in alpha-test and updated daily.

It can be used to log into a historical Unix system such as 2.11 BSD on the PiDP11 or a real historical system

Install the tek4010 emulator from this repo on a Raspberry Pi. The emulator uses "rsh", because historical Unix systems do not support the secure ssh, and because ssh does not allow using a virtual emulator such as tek4010. You need therefore to install rsh on the Raspberry Pi running the tek4010 emulator:

sudo apt-get install rsh-client

Login in a remote historical Unix system

This can either be a real historical computer, or a virtual system using simh such as the PiDP-11.

First, you need to login remotely from your client machine into your historical system, using

rsh -l user_name system

where "user_name" is the name of the user on the historical Unix system, and "system" is the name of the system, for example

rsh -l rene pdp11

If this works properly, you can use the tek4010 emulator. Call it as follows:

./tek4010 /usr/bin/rsh -l user_name system

It the current alpha-testing version, there are very few useful hints if this does not work. If the terminal window is closed right away, there is a problem with your rsh call or you forgot to use the absolute path for rsh.

The following keys are not transmitted to the Unix system, but are executed locally in the terminal emulator and clear the persistent screen:

home
page up
page down
control arrow up
control arrow left

These keys emulate the "page" key of the Tektronix 4010. You need to use one of these keys frequently to avoid to get a mess on the screen, as on a real Tektronix 4010.

Login in PiDP11 running on the same Raspberry Pi

This is really work in progress, but works amazingly well already. It is running with a screen and keyboard attached to the Raspberry Pi, or almost equally well using VNC viewer from a laptop!

Expect a bit of slow down from time to time. In my test version the PiDP11 software and the tek4010 software are using all 4 cores of the Raspberry Pi 3B+ running at 70% CPU usage! It's amazing how powerful the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is!

You cannot use the tek4010 emulator running screens, as it is done in the standard setup of the PiDP using the console, because screens filters the output stream of simh and is therefore unsuitable for graphics terminals such as the tek4010 emulator. If you don't want to change the standard setup, use e to stop simh, and then "exit" to quit simh.

Because tek4010 insists on using rsh, you need to install rsh-server and rsh-client on the Raspberry Pi:

sudo apt-get install rsh-server
sudo apt-get install rsh-client

Now start tek4010 as follows:

./tek4010 /usr/bin/rsh -l pi localhost

This should give you a login prompt into your Raspberry Pi. If not, test the rsh call first.

Once your password has been accepted, be prepared to use the "home" key or any of the other keys described above frequently to avoid to get a mess on the dump 4010 terminal emulator! The following will start the PiDP software:

cd /opt/pidp11/bin
./pidp11.sh

Everything should run as expected, and you should be able to use the tek4010 terminal emulator with any of the historical operating systems. It has not yet been tested on other systems than 2.11 BSD. Your feedback to rricharz77@gmail.com or the PiDP11 forum is therefore very much appreciated.

One word of caution! If you run the PiDP11 software this way without using screens, you SHOULD NOT detach or quit the terminal while your historical operating system is running, because this will kill the PiDP11 simh emulator right away. First run down your historical operating system and simh properly, before detaching the terminal emulator!

Reporting problems

As this software is still under development, there will be problems. I just do not have enough programs doing graphics to properly test the program.

If everything works properly for you, but your graphics application produces garbage on the tek4010 emulator, you could send me your data as follows: On a historical Unix system, type

your_graphics_program > captured_data

I don't know how this can be done on other operating systems. You can then mail your captured_data file together with a description of the problem to rricharz77@gmail.com. Pack it with zip or something else to make sure that the mailing program does not alter it.

Compiling the tek4010 project

If you want to compile the project, you need to install "libgtk-3-dev":

sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev

There is a make file in the repo.