Almost two years ago I discovered James McCombe's GLTerminal. Some people hacked it to work with Tiger, but I (and others) discovered after upgrading to Leopard that the Classic Terminal view was oddly scrambled, so to fix it I rearranged the character bitmap, as you can see under the cut:
( a tale of two character maps )

new and worksafe

As others noted, the original icon was a little over-the-top (jwz quote: "most inappropriate fanboyriffic application icon evar."), so I made it something more work-safe, a VT220 screen with "GL TERM" in green text.

old and "animeriffic"

To make Classic Terminal mode work (the pictured green-phosphor look) you still need to open the Preferences and re-select the "Classic Terminal" plugin, then click Save. I re-ordered the tabs with "Renderer" being the default, so at least you don't have to click on the Renderer tab like you used to; click-count - 1. If someone could reverse-engineer it so this step wasn't necessary, that would be nice. If James McCombe would update it (or even release the original source), that would be even better. Petition him via email, if you like.

Oh, and lastly it works pretty well with Spaces in full screen mode, though the window doesn't display right when looking at all your spaces (not bad for an app made in 2002, five years before Spaces was even developed).

Download GLTerminal updated for 10.5, sil vous plait.

EDIT 20090904: it still works fine on Snow Leopard. fyi, on my Macbook Pro 13" it pegs the CPU at just under 10% usage in top.

i really want to get this for abby. sadly, she won't see the humor in it, but that's okay, because other geek parents who grew up in the 80s will.

this cafepress user has all manner of items bearing the READY prompt, including a thong.

atari & commodore users reprazent!

screw cell phones, i'll just get a portable rotary phone.

if i get the red version then it can't possibly be my fault if i get pulled over for answering my phone while i'm driving—can't you see it's a red phone, officer? it must be an emergency!

glterminal is a nifty opengl terminal emulator written for mac os x by james mccombe. it supports normal terminal emulation, or classic amber or green-screen mode (complete with scan lines, phosphor persistence, and even barrel distortion). great for making your high-end monitor look like a cheap vt52.

this version works with 10.4. mccombe is working on an official, updated version.

this reminds me of when i had a vt hooked up to my beige g3 to do email on, except now it's an emulated terminal running on a studio display hooked to my powerbook. it's interesting that even though technology moves forward, we still strive to recreate our past with it.