I love old terminals. I used to sit at the ones in the library for ages (I often managed to 'escape' into the data controller somehow :P ). And at college, all the X-Terminals were often occupied because they were the only way to run NSCA Mosaic to see this cool new "Internet" stuff. Meaning the rooms full of green screen terminals were completely deserted. I usually took two for myself (This was before I learned of Gnu Screen and tmux lol)

I still have my own VT520 <3 Not getting rid of it (my girlfriend keeps asking why do I keep that old thing around, grrr)

I work in a bank, and we still have to drop into "3270" from time to time to modify stuff in the core.

The gui apps connected to it are just sending the data stream in the background.

Long lasting technology really.. But we're on the way to replace the core now.. Not looking forward to it tbh!

This is magnificent reverse engineering. I wonder why retrocomputing is so fascinating? Is it an attempt (by older people) to rediscover their youth, or is it a search for a golden age of computing where people still had some autonomy over their hardware? Or something else?

The article mentions various old chips that interface to the 3270 data stream. Does anyone know what the similar chips are to interface to IBM's bus-and-tag? I saw bus-and-tag interface chips that converted the weird voltage levels a few years ago but lost the part number and haven't been able to find them since.

I wonder if a simple MCU wouldn’t be a better option to an FPGA in this case.