It provided a display with 12 rows and 80 columns of upper-case text, and used an expanded set of control characters and forward-only scrolling based on the earlier VT05.

These terminals supported asynchronous communication at baud rates up to 9600 bits per second and did not require any fill characters.

Like other early DEC terminals they were equipped with both an RS-232 port as well as a 20mA current loop, an older serial standard used with teletype machines that was more suitable for transmission over long runs of twisted-pair wiring.

To interpret the commands being sent in the serial data, it used a primitive central processing unit (CPU) built from small-scale-integration integrated circuits.

Moreover, the time taken by such a loop had to be nearly constant, or text lower on the screen would be displayed in the wrong place during that refresh.

"[2] DEC also offered an optional hard-copy device called an electrolytic copier, which fit into the blank panel on the right side of the display.

[5][6] Digital patented the innovation of having a single character generator provide the text font for both screen and copier.

The basic layout of the terminal, with the screen and main keyboard on the left and the blank area on the right, was intended to allow the system to be upgraded.

Another three of the keys were unlabeled and could be programmed to return any two-character code, and would default to ESCP through R.[8] The VT50 was soon replaced by the greatly upgraded VT52.

This allowed the terminal to scroll backwards a limited amount without having to ask the host to re-send data.

This was invoked by sending a command string that sent the terminal into graphics mode, with further data being sent to a separate buffer and CPU.

This unpublished language was to be used to easily develop additional models specific to single Digital marketing organizations.

These terminals synthesized a "tock" sound on a speaker for feedback when a key was pressed instead of the relay.

The relatively large expansion area of the VT50 case, combined with rapidly shrinking electronics in the late 1970s, allowed DEC to produce single-box, stand-alone minicomputer/terminals similar to a contemporary microcomputer.

Unusual were glyphs for ¹⁄, ³⁄, ⁵⁄, ⁷⁄, which could be combined with subscript numbers to produce things like ⅗, and scan lines allowing a function to be plotted with 8 times higher vertical resolution than text.

[13] Compatibility mode changed the response to the ESCZ command; all models responded with the code ESC/Z.