Plato terminal

From: Lawrence LeMay <lemay_at_cs.umn.edu>
Date: Fri Jan 29 21:46:55 1999

Well, i figured it was about time I took my terminal out of the closet and
tried to get it to work again. Well, the good news is it still appears
to be working.

This beast is a Control Data Corporation Plato terminal. As far as I know,
its the original model of plato terminal. Touch screen, vector graphics,
square monitor area... big base unit a tad bigger than my IBM pentium
computer, with a video display unit that sits on top and merges with
teh base unit. Keyboard is about as non-standard as i've ever seen.

There are side panels on both sides of the base unit, which contain all
the circuit cards for the smart terminal. It looks like this was made
around 1975 since the proms are dated then, and some other board had a chip
dated 1974... 8080a cpu.. I have the optional modem card, not that i can
use it (1200 rcv, 150 xmt ;) ;)

This baby can support all sorts of baud rates, most of which are useless ;)
Lets see, if i recieve at 1260 baud, i can transmit at one of these rates:
1260, 630, 157.5, 126, 78.2 baud.

If I recieve at 1200 baud (yes! a useful rate) I can transmit at 1200, 600,
150, 120, 75 baud.

I only have 4K ram, does anyone have a spare 4k ram board for this ;) ;)

I can see why I havent been using this, it looks like I need to wire up
a rs-232 adapter box. Pin 3 is recieve, pin 14 is transmit, pin 7 is ground.
Am I correct in assuming that i just need to move 14 to 2, or am i getting
2 and 3 swapped around? I woudl want to connectthis termianl to a cp/m
computer as its console, and not to a modem.

Ok, time for the impossible question: Does anyone have a manual for this?

I had some leftover old 1000 speed film in teh old automatic-everything
el-cheapo 35mm camera, so i turned onteh flash and snapped a few photos,
so with any luck i'll have some poor images of this beast by tomorrow.

Hmm, if no manual is available, maybe an old termcap entry might make
this terminal useful again....

How many thousands of dollars is this beast worth? i may go broke buying
cloth covers for this stuff ;)

-Lawrence LeMay
Received on Fri Jan 29 1999 - 21:46:55 GMT