I love old terminals and I still have a VT520 which is still very practicable, it can do up to 115200 instead of rhe VT-100's 9600.

But most programs ignore termcap these days which is a huge issue. Running stuff through tmux helps but it's not ideal.

Every now and then I look for a vt320 from my university days. Still miss the smell of hot dust on CRT electron guns.

Back in college I ended up rooming with a bunch of unix neck beards and we used a vt320 as our "house control system." It controlled a rack in the basement hooked up to sound systems, tv remote controls for the living room entertainment systems which included a 70in crt monitor that played movie rips from network storage. Fun times.

MAME will emulate several terminals. Among them is the vt240.

Here are my links for roms and docs:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/terminal/

https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/terminal-simulator/issues/1

https://www.mail-archive.com/simh@trailing-edge.com/msg09086...

https://forums.bannister.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Num...

https://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/qgzCvrl8/dec-vt-emula...

I have a bunch of PDFs in along with this, and a vt240.zip that must have come from one of the above.

I also used this command line call to get the terminal running with "bitbanger."

  mame -rp . vt240 -window -nothrottle -host null_modem -bitb socket.localhost:2323

You can put two of these back to back with the transmit and receiver wires crossed, and type straight from one to the other. Did this as a kid to chat with my little sister in another room.

"generating SIGTERM on Control + C"

That'll be SIGINT, but I understand, he just tests whether we pay attention.

There's a VT520 at my local hackspace which I spent some time getting running with a Pi, it's surprisingly practical - though as the author says the DEC keyboards are atrocious, it's like typing into wet sand.