I've got some
Westinghouse ariline reservation terminals that have some rather exotic keyboards. The terminals are block mode devices, so you're supposed to edit a fill-out form on the screen and then hit "transmit". The terminal then sends the contents of the form to the mainframe as a block of data. Most people are familiar with character-at-a-time serial RS-232 terminals, but many serial terminals can operate in "block mode" as well. The idea was to unburden the remote computer from having to respond every time you pressed a key.
I bought a batch of these mostly because I liked the colored keyboard keys. If I'm ever going to get them talking, I'll need to either find a way to understand their proprietary block mode protocol (hopefully it's just a variant of IBM 3270 block mode protocol), or I'll need to replace the firmware in the terminals to have them talking something normal. The latter, while much more work, is entirely feasible. Let's face it, a terminal is unlikely to have anything more complicated than scan circuitry to sense keypresses, memory mapped display for the video and some sort of serial interface for the communications. They typically use stock microprocessors, so you can even dump the firmware ROM and reverse engineer it.
If anyone else has experience with these sorts of terminals, I'd love to hear about it.
