Gas plasma displays

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_northernway.net>
Date: Fri May 16 08:08:22 1997

Due to massive amounts of caffeine & sleep deprivation, Paul E Coad said:
>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.

Ahhhh, yes... those were the good ol' days! I remember *working* on these,
and I can tell you that they were --==Sweet!!!==-- Extremely easy on the
eyes, with said 4 terminals made it very handy to work on different
machines at the same time. Even with 4 windows on the one terminal, ISTR
that there were almost no jaggies...

I worked for EDS (owned by GM) in 1989-1990 in Auburn Hills, MI, and had a
chance to work with IBM/Amdahl mainframes, some of the CAD terminals that
engineers designed the cars on, some early SUN hardware (can't remember
which machines... they were set inside consoles, so all you had to work
with were the keyboards/mice/monitors... I just remember *badly* wanting
one) and a bunch of other gnarly hardware!

It made me cry when I had to work on our 1-and-only overworked AS/400 that
took up to 2 hours to execute one command! One night (when load was lower)
I remember entering a [simple] command (WRKACTJOB [work with active jobs],
if memory serves), taking orders for the entire control room, driving to
Taco Bell (6-7 miles away), getting/paying for the food, went back and
distributed everything, and I was still done eating 10 minutes before the
command displayed output!

Anyone out there have a GPD for sale for $5 that I can interface to my
CoCo3? *Pinch* Owww! Damn! I'm at work! <sniff>

Gotta go!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger       | If at first you don't succeed,
Programmer, NorthernWay | nuclear warhead disarmament should
zmerch_at_northernway.net  | *not* be your first career choice.
Received on Fri May 16 1997 - 08:08:22 BST

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