Using an Atari ST as Unix/Linux Terminal

According to Wikipedia, a text terminal is "a serial computer interface for text entry and display". It was the principal way of communicating with computers in the 70's. As a Text terminal requires extremely basic computing needs, it is easy to emulate in software, even on a 8 bit computer.

For using your atari ST as a Unix/Linux terminal you will need:

• a serial port, or an USB to serial adpter on your Unix/Linux computer
• a null modem cable to plug on the serial port of the ST
• an Atari ST or better with Terminal Emulator software. We recommend to use TAZ.

USB serial adapter on Linux

An USB serial adapter looks like this:


You can just throw the CD driver away, as Linux has built-in support for these devices. When plugged, you can see it has been recognized using the dmesg command.

[137052.801088] usb 5-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7
[137053.000142] usb 5-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0403, idProduct=6001
[137053.000151] usb 5-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[137053.000158] usb 5-1: Product: USB Serial Converter
[137053.000162] usb 5-1: Manufacturer: FTDI
[137053.000167] usb 5-1: SerialNumber: FTFNLXMS
[137053.000422] usb 5-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[137053.008214] ftdi_sio 5-1:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected
[137053.008277] usb 5-1: Detected FT232RL
[137053.008282] usb 5-1: Number of endpoints 2
[137053.008287] usb 5-1: Endpoint 1 MaxPacketSize 64
[137053.008292] usb 5-1: Endpoint 2 MaxPacketSize 64
[137053.008296] usb 5-1: Setting MaxPacketSize 64
[137053.009259] usb 5-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0 

Most important to us here is the last line, which tells that the kernel has assigned the name /dev/ttyUSB0 as a serial port.