:''"VT-05" can also refer to .'' The VT05 is the first free-standing CRT

computer terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...

from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...

introduced in 1970. Famous for its futuristic styling, the VT05 presents the user with an upper-case-only ASCII character display of 72 columns by 20 rows. The VT05 was a smart terminal that provides cursor addressing using a series of

control character In computing and telecommunication, a control character or non-printing character (NPC) is a code point (a number) in a character set, that does not represent a written symbol. They are used as in-band signaling to cause effects other than the ...

s, one of which allows the cursor to be positioned at an absolute location on the screen. This basic system provided the basis of similar systems in the later and greatly improved VT50 and

VT52 The VT50 was a CRT-based computer terminal introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in July 1974. It provided a display with 12 rows and 80 columns of upper-case text, and used an expanded set of control characters and forward-only scro ...

series. The terminal only supports forward scrolling and direct cursor addressing; no fancier editing functions are supported. No special character renditions (such as blinking, bolding, underlining, or reverse video) are supported. The VT05 supports

asynchronous communication In telecommunications, asynchronous communication is transmission of data, generally without the use of an external clock signal, where data can be transmitted intermittently rather than in a steady stream. Any timing required to recover data f ...

at baud rates up to 2400 bits per second (although fill characters are required above 300 bits per second). Internally, the VT05 implements four "quad-sized" DEC modules in a standard form-factor DEC backplane. The cards are mounted nearly horizontally over an off-the-shelf CRT monitor. The terminal is 19" wide and 30" deep (much deeper than a typical desk). The keyboard used advanced capacitive sensors, but this proved to be unreliable and later keyboards use a simple four-contact mechanical switch. The VT05's dynamic storage is a PMOS

shift register A shift register is a type of digital circuit using a cascade of flip-flops where the output of one flip-flop is connected to the input of the next. They share a single clock signal, which causes the data stored in the system to shift from one loc ...

; the delays associated with manipulating data in the shift register result in the VT05 requiring

fill character In computer terminology, a fill character is a character transmitted solely for the purpose of consuming time. It does this by filling a timeslot on a data transmission line which would otherwise be forced to be idle (empty). In this way, fill cha ...

s after each

line feed Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

(as compared to contemporaneous

hard copy ''Hard Copy'' is an American tabloid television show that ran in syndication from 1989 to 1999. ''Hard Copy'' was aggressive in its use of questionable material on television, including gratuitous violence. The original hosts of ''Hard Copy' ...

terminals which require fill characters after each

carriage return A carriage return, sometimes known as a cartridge return and often shortened to CR, or return, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. It is closely associated with the line feed ...

). The VT05 also has the capability of acting as a black-and-white

RS-170 The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplementa ...

-standard video monitor for

videotape recorder A video tape recorder (VTR) is a tape recorder designed to record and playback video and audio material from magnetic tape. The early VTRs were open-reel devices that record on individual reels of 2-inch-wide (5.08 cm) tape. They were us ...

camera A camera is an optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), with a ...

s, and other sources. The VT05 is equipped with a video input, and can superimpose its text over the displayed video, making it suitable for interactive video systems. The VT05 was eventually superseded by the VT50 which itself was quickly superseded by the

Commands

The VT05 has a limited command set: The screen can be cleared by sending GS and then US.

References

External links

VT100 net

DEC VT05
Terminals Wiki * {{Digital Equipment Corporation DEC computer terminals VT005 Computer-related introductions in 1970