Hazeltine?

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Wed Mar 10 22:11:13 1999

Marvin <marvin_at_rain.org> wrote:
> Russ Blakeman wrote:
> > Anyone heard of a Hazeltine? Not sure of the model but I have a black
>
> They made quite a few different models of terminals, and one thing I have
> heard but not yet confirmed, is that one of the models had some core memory
> in it.

If this is so, I wouldn't be surprised to find that that model is the
Hazeltine 2000, a real piece of work.

It's kind of boxy: one rectangular box for the monitor, with a black
front and sort of goldenrod-shade-of-beige metal case, or maybe the
ones I saw were just yellowed by exposure to chain-smoking
programmers, and a matching yellowish boxy keyboard attached by way of
a thick cable.

The display is a relatively long-persistence green CRT, capable of
showing twenty-something (24 I think) lines of 74 columns each. The
ones I saw could not display lower case, but as they were talking to
something whose native character set was FIELDATA there was no lower
case that needed displaying.

Best of all, it's too stupid to clear the screen when powered on, and
likely as not what it greets you with first thing in the morning is a
garbled version of what it was showing you last night when you turned
it off. (There is a reset button, one of the round pushbuttons on the
right edge of the keyboard, which clears the display should you like
to start fresh.) So while I wouldn't be surprised to find that the
display memory is core, I'd be even less surprised to find that it is
some kind of acoustic delay line.

I wish I had had the foresight to grab one when that PPOE got rid of
them in the mid-1980s, because I haven't seen one since. I do seem to
have kept a manual and my inventory says it is dated January 1975.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Wed Mar 10 1999 - 22:11:13 GMT