It’s interesting you bring this up. I have thought along these lines several times in the past several years. I’ve had to ask myself what would it do, what would you need it for, why would you use this over a laptop? Here is what I’ve come up with:
I think there is room in the market for what I call something that’s a like to a mobile crash cart. Basically a laptop form facter screen, keyboard, media hub, and touch surface/mouse that plugs into a server or desktop system when their peripherals are damaged otherwise gone. Not quite the same as a mobile dumb terminal, but basically a tech aid device that collapses the entire mobile crash cart you use in say a data center or a co-locator down to basically a laptop that allows directly attaching its peripherals to another system to act as those peripherals. This is obviously in lieu of KVM style equipment. You could run the entire thing with one USB-C cable from a modern system and then you could have ports for a much older systems if that was unavailable all on one ultrathin folding device.
Then there’s the idea of the modern dumb terminal, as cool as that might be there’s no real call for anymore with sophisticated terminal emulators. I thought of it, but when you really think about it hard, it doesn’t sound like a real problem.
So you have to kind of work with what we have, you could get a mobile monitor and keyboard, but they wouldn’t be compatible with most SGIs.
The closest thing I’ve come up with, out of my own equipment, is much older ultra portable laptops that have expansion slots, i.e. PC card/cardbus/PCMCIA and I’ve placed both single or dual/multi ported serial cards in that slot. The laptop itself is old enough to have its own slot, it’s a Dell D420 latitude.
so if I play my cards right I have three serial ports that are pretty real. You could just as well get very high-quality USB to serial port adapters and they would probably work just fine for most situations as well. So then the issue becomes how do you transfer to the local system. Right now I rarely deal with systems that actually fully run an operating system so it’s not really an issue, but if I had to, I’d have to learn an implement some kind of X or Z modem protocol, sort of technique in order to use the serial interface to copy files down, depending on the OS I run on the laptop. Otherwise I use wireless networking to ethernet via FTP on the SGI or potentially it might be possible if I was running Lennox on the laptop that I could implement SLIP to the SGI using some sort of UUCP?
This gives me a relatively simple implementation, but there’s a lot of cables involved. I have my power cable because the battery doesn’t really work and I have my serial cables because of course I have multiple serial cables!
I think if I had a very integrated environment, I would try something like Jan-Jaap has… a large serial console terminal system. A large switch like device that actually has 8P8C RJ45 connections that are all serial ports that you basically tell me into or you use some sort of web interface to interact with.
Those have the ability to have 24 to 48 serial ports so there’s plenty to hook up and they use normal network cable so you can fairly easily make your own adapter by using old-style serial to RJ45 adapters. After giving it thought for a number of years. I think this solution is actually the best one when you have a lot of machines and you want some on a maintenance cycle with serial interface and sometimes you need two or three serial ports on one machine, no problem, just whip out a bunch of extra long, ethernet cables with the appropriate adapters and snap them in to your SGI and then take out your normal ultra portable every day laptop of any maker model and remote into the terminal switch device and just start working. I think, even though this is one of the bulkier implementations I think as long as you specialize the area ahead of time it’s one of the quickest and easiest to do an adhoc serial port.
That doesn’t help the monitor/keyboard scenario for graphical usage. That’s one. I really don’t have a real answer for. A part of me wanted to do the exact same thing you do with the serial terminal, use a KVM end point for an older version that’s compatible with SGI systems. There are a few that were made, and you could get your hands on them. As long as you a standard 13 W3 to VGA cable adapter ahead of the old VGA KVM PS/2 KVM endpoint.
The problem is using an old KVM system is you’d be stuck using the physical station’s monitor & keyboard interface as most of them use a Java web interface for their remote features and all of that is broken on newer systems. Unless you put a newer KVM on the old KVM‘s master controls to get around this problem there’s a big problem of software. Unless you’re going to run an old laptop that runs that old software in order to even use the system, which kind of negates everything.
so I hope that answered your question, I’ve thought along the same lines and I still think you either should run a bunch of serial adapters on an ultra thin laptop if you want the direct multi terminal experience. Otherwise, I would establish a terminal server infrastructure, using a large terminal device switch.
For the graphical peripherals compatible with all SGI‘s, I don’t have any cool ultra portable solution. My current solution is a high-end DeWalt folding construction table, it’s a great table, that folds up like an old style poker card table. So you take the table wherever you need they need to deploy it that I have a Series of 17 and 19 inch monitors that easily interface with SGI’s and a PS2 keyboard and mouse along with a power strip. That is what I currently use as my around the residence mobile SGI workspace.
I admit that I wish I could find a way to plug in the monitor and keyboard and mouse directly into my ultra portable laptop to use on the SGI equipment, but I just don’t see a way to do it without a bunch of very special devices that just would make it a mess of cables and dongles and special software that would make a cumbersome implementation,
(08-08-2025, 12:05 PM)mapesdhs Wrote: Weblacky, just a brainstorming thought, given all the modern tech available these days. Would it be possible to make something that provides VT100 emulation to show Console output, plugs into the serial port, connects to a monitor via HDMI, driven by USB kybd/mouse? I found this:
https://geoffg.net/terminal.html
I was wondering if there was anything newer, or if you'd heard of such a thing.
For SGIs of course it would be handy to have different types of serial port.
Ian.
NEED -> 
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