Talk:VT52

The terminal supported forward and reverse scrolling, allowing full-screen editing for the first time.

The critical feature was the ability to move the cursor position at all, not specifically being able to scroll the screen downwards. Yes, if you moved the cursor up whilst on the top line the entire screen did scroll but without this reverse scrolling it would still be possible to implement a full-screen editor by redrawing. On a slow line this would be cumbersome of course and the reverse scrolling was definitely important, but cursor movement was key.

(Further historical note: vt52 could not scroll part of the screen (unlike vt100) so when editing text in the middle of a document it was necessary to redraw everything below when lines were added/deleted. On very slow lines this redraw would sometimes only take place when the edit was completed; that is, added lines would temporarily overwrite what was on-screen.)

Ros0709 15:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

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On the printer...
There is a claim that the print did electroplating. I suppose it is possible, but it seems unlikely because one did not normally have to replace anything but the paper. One electrode was a spiral trace on a roller, while the other was straight, and was occasionally replaced. (I seem to recall it getting bent once...)  The roller spun and a current was apparently passed through the paper. I believe it worked by burning the paper. It was definitely visible on both sides. The paper had to be wet, so the first day back from Christmas vacation, the paper roll and the tray it sat in would be doused in the water fountain.

The odd thing is that the printer unit plugged directly into the motherboard, without a cable. This meant that the spinning of the motor would be transmitted to motherboard. The effect was to break the character generator chip. When this happened, the characters on screen would be very messed up. Sometimes you could hit the terminal on the top and the chip would be knocked back into place, for a time. (Of course, it was also a sign that it was time to call DEC for service.) David Garfield (talk) 08:10, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Belated comment :-) Thanks for that confirmation, I came here being doubtful about the "electrolytic" wondering whether it was actually coated paper as used on 1970s photocopiers. I've seen some early fax machines that had that spiral/blade arrangement, I think that there was a silver salt in the paper and passing a current through it would convert it to metallic silver which was visible- and as you say both sides. Bit like Stan Jones MarkMLl (talk) 07:47, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

How did the VT55 work?
I looked over the VT55 Programmer's Manual, and I'm stumped as to how the system worked. The manual is written for people using FORTRAN or BASIC, and it fails to even mention how the libraries send the commands to the terminal. I assume this was done through the same serial port, as opposed to a separate port of some sort, as the manual does mention the switch between text and graphics mode.

Does anyone have a list of the actual commands and how they were sent to the terminal? Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:57, 17 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Found and fixed - waveform graphics. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:47, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Predecessor was ???
What was the predecessor to the VT5x? Was it the VT05? That seems unlikely as that came out four years earlier. Does anyone have documentation or a product announcement or something showing the lineage? Ben (talk) 21:17, 6 February 2022 (UTC)