Gas plasma displays

From: Paul E Coad <pcoad_at_crl.com>
Date: Fri May 16 03:39:09 1997

On Thu, 15 May 1997, William Donzelli wrote:

> IBM once made some awesome terminals, mostly for the 30xx mainframes.
> They were quite large and had a fantastic resolution - I seem to remember
> them being able to display four _nice_ looking terminal windows without
> overlap. I think this was in the early 1980s timeframe.
>
I remember seeing these at a site I visited once. They were totally cool.
Especially compared to the all metal green screen 3278s I had been using
for the previous few years. I also remember 4 non-overlapping virtual
3278s being displayed on the screen. The display was about 4-6 inches
deep and around 19 inches diagonally. (The 3278s I was using were about
2 feet deep.) I saw these in use in the early 90s.

> I once saw a few at a hamfest a year or so back, but they still had hefty
> price tags - $200. I am sure that was a small fraction of their original
> cost.

I'm sure that there are plenty of shops which would pay $200 each.
There was a time in which I would have paid $200 of my own money to
be able to use one of these. They beat the hell out of using 2 terminals
or Tubes. There is another cool thing. This software allowed use of
multiple virtual terminals on a single terminal with hot key switching.
We thought this was pretty hot stuff at the time.

--pec
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Received on Fri May 16 1997 - 03:39:09 BST