And they tell me printing pdfs to read is waste!

Like a TTY?

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

Can anything not play Doom?

Terminal emulators are bloat

The Linux kernel itself contains a terminal emulator

that's how you can swap among virtual terminals on the console

and unless the code was rewritten at some point, that's really the true core of Linux; the Linux kernel originally was a terminal emulator, before the other stuff got added. Before Linus even made his first announcement, when it was still a purely one-man project that he was banging on:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-very-first-interview-about-linux

The very first interview about Linux with Linus Torvalds - Oct 28, 1992

LN: Please give a short summary of the history of Linux.

Linus: Difficult. "Linux" didn't really exist until about August-91 - before that what I had was essentially just a very basic protected mode system that had evolved from a glorified "Hello world" program into a even more glorified terminal emulator. Linux stopped for quite a while at the terminal emulator stage: I played around with Minix, and used my protected mode program to read news from the univerity machine. No down/upload, but it did a fair vt100 emulation, and did it by using two tasks which communicated from keybodard->modem and modem->screen.

By mid-summer -91, "Linux" was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.

That being said, I think that most people are probably using the framebuffer console these days

you aren't usually talking to your graphics card in text mode on x86-64 machines, but rather in graphics mode, and an image of text is being rendered and handed to the graphics card, and I don't know if internally, the original virtual terminal code is used beneath that or if there's a different stack and two independent in-kernel virtual terminal emulators.

Instead of unalias ls to avoid having just ls send ANSI color escape codes to the terminal, he should really have passed the term argument to agetty, like maybe dumb.

EDIT: At 10:22, where he starts typing the login, it looks like the teletype does seek back up to reposition the cursor at "LOGIN:", so it does support at least some limited escape codes. Maybe something a little smarter than dumb.

Hell, maybe there's even an existing terminfo/termcap entry for a compatible teletype.

EDIT2:

$ infocmp -D|xargs -i% find % -type f|xargs -n1 basename|xargs -n1 infocmp|less

Will give a searchable list of supported terminfo entries on a given Linux system.

On Debian trixie, I don't see an entry for a Model 15 Teletype, but they do have an entry for a "model 33 or 35 teletype", tty33.

EDIT3: Searching eBay, looks like there are apparently teletype machines available on eBay, though some additional poking around suggests that that may not be the most affordable way to get one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Teletype/comments/g30rdi/where_to_buy_first_teletype/

EDIT4: Oh, looking at the agetty command line, he passed "asr33", for the term parameter, which is apparently a (much, much newer than the machine he has) teletype machine, but it shouldn't support color, so I don't know why he'd be worried about that. Maybe his ls aliased to ls --color=always instead of ls --color=auto or something; they don't show it in the video. Or maybe unaliasing it wasn't necessary, and he just didn't realize it.

I was watching the thing and got to the part where he said that he was using XON/XOFF flow control and thought that the guy's Arduino RS-232 ASCII-to-Baudot-encoding thing could be made more efficient if he'd make the encoder use the RS-232 RTS/CTS lines instead of XON/XOFF encoding. Then I realized that he's converting to 45.5 baud, and that at that speed, even his 9600 baud line

normally the chokepoint for people with modern hardware, you know, 1980s and on or so

is blisteringly fast and inefficiency at that point is irrelevant.

That is insane!

Shit that beats out connecting my 90s serial equipped typewriter to use as a terminal output.

Mate, it's not that deep.

That typewriter probably doesn't support color, but apparently some had a ribbon with multiple colors and the ability to select among them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/1jnie9o/can_someone_pls_tell_me_why_my_typewriter_has/

This guy is using it to do color accents with typewriter art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqi2qY918M

EDIT: Oh, wait, holy shit. This ribbon is multicolor

you can see the red stripe on the ribbon, and apparently the Remington Travel Riter Deluxe does support multiple colors on a ribbon.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133756651478

EDIT2: Here's the manual:

https://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/RemingtonRandTravel-RiterDeLuxe_Manual.pdf

I think that it's the lever in the upper right on the front that switches color.

EDIT3: You know, decades ago, I remember fiddling with my dad's typewriter. It had a selector lever there too. Could never figure out what it was for, seem to recall that it adjusted the height of the hammers, which seemed pointless. He only had a black ribbon, but I bet that it supported a multicolor ribbon, and that's what it was for. Never did resolve that mystery until now!

My guy, I literally typed out the fastfetch output for Arch Linux.