In the sense of physical beauty of the terminal hardware itself, it's hard to beat the Raygun Gothic stylings of the original

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT05

The VT05 also has a unique feature missing from subsequent terminals in the series: monochrome NTSC video input, allowing relatively straightforward use as a secondary graphical display on a modern system.

The site appears to be down, here's the archived page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201031080857/https://www.oldco...

It can only do 19,200 bit/s, give it a second!

Thanks for posting this up - site down already!

We spent hours playing VTTrek during college on the DEC-2060. Glorious battles between the Federation and Klingons. I only wish I had video of some of these games. The game was written in MACRO-10 and featured 3D game play using ASCII renditions of stars, planets, and ships. The Enter key on the numeric keypad certainly took a beating as that was your propulsion key (if I recall correctly). There's a former DEC employee who posted the source code and more information on the game http://raspuzzi.org/vttrek/vttrek.html

Edit: special thanks to MRC for being so kind to me at Stanford in 1980/81. I asked dumb questions and he sent me in the right direction.

I love DEC VTs. Spent the first few years of my career as as a VAX sysadmin, and basically lived in front of various VT220s, 320s and 420s. Never got to use an original VT10x though.

I still hanker for a VT420 as they were the best - I can't afford one though[1], so I've had to settle for a Wyse WY-50 for my retro collection, which although is VT compatible, is not nearly as nice.

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[1] If you have one you want to sell, let me know!

I've recently started writing a terminal emulator (because...) and it's surprising how many capabilities of even the vt10x's are not supported properly by most terminal emulators. Never mind the newer ones like the VT420 with ReGIS and Sixel support etc.

Terminals seems to have gone largely backwards in terms of capability. I guess largely because they're mostly used for the lowest common denominator, and beyond that people move to web/gui interfaces, and so little software requires a more capable terminal.

To get really accurate terminal emulation, you could get the firmware ROM off a real terminal and build an emulator that executes that firmware.

Someone's started doing that in MAME, for the DEC VT520, although I've never tried running it so don't know how well it works (if at all) – https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/drivers...

I have a VT510, non-graphical. It's a little dim, but I like it.

I had three VT420 terminals twenty years ago. Sad to say my parents chucked them out before I was going to use them with Linux.

Someone get them a bottle of Retro-Brite.

Built like a tank.