Nikhil Jha spent weeks building a terminal-based coding agent. Then he asked a reasonable question: will this run on the original terminal? A DEC VT-100 from 1978. The thing that defined ANSI escape sequences. Every modern terminal still speaks VT-100. So in theory, his software should work. Theory and practice diverge fast at 9600 baud.
The hardware is weirdly lovable. Intel 8080 processor. 3KB of RAM. Getting it connected meant an oscilloscope and some creative wiring because TX and RX were flipped. But connecting it was the easy part.
Actually running software on it? Nightmare. macOS dropped support for the flow control the VT-100 expects years ago. He needed a Linux VM just to get bash working. Full-screen redraws at 9600 baud take forever. ANSI escape sequences eat into bandwidth you don't have. His differential renderer had bugs causing unnecessary redraws. Somewhere in this mess he realized his app was spitting out Unicode and OSC sequences that a 1978 terminal simply cannot understand. ASCII-only mode. Legacy rendering mode. Strip out anything the hardware can't process. An enterprise customer later asked for that ASCII mode as an actual feature for their own ancient terminals.
Modern AI agents run massive reasoning workloads on GPU clusters and stream results to whatever thin client you have. This is just the 1970s time-sharing model again. The VT-100 was a screen and keyboard plugged into a remote mainframe. Computing moved back to the server. The terminal is just where you see the output. A 1978 CRT or a browser tab running GitHub Codespaces. Same dumb terminal, same smart machine somewhere else.