rescued a beehive!

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Fri May 19 18:07:04 2000

Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com> wrote:
> Oh if we're going to get funky lets talk about the (in)famous "MicroBee",
> the original Beehive terminal. This two ton, white painted, monstrosity

Yeah, but did it clear screen memory on power-up? The Hazeltine 2000
didn't. First you powered it up, then you waited for it to warm up,
then you might push the clear-screen key to make it wipe all that junk
off the screen before you got started.

> weighed in at about 40 lbs even though the terminal wasn't much larger than
> VT340. The display was a blurry blueish white on blackish green. The thing
> only had 20 lines and only 72 characters on those lines. Cursor control was

72 characters...OK, I understand that, Teletypes did 72 characters per
line. 80 characters/line was just like an IBM card (modulo the System/3
cards, anyway). But 74? The only thing I can think is that it's like 72,
but BIGGER!

> It was considered extreme kung-fu to get FINE (a TOPS-10 emacs clone) to
> work at all on the thing. (oh and it sent ^S, ^Q (couldn't prevent it) if
> you talked to it over 2400 baud)

In that day and age it seemed to be considered formerly-extreme
kung-fu (i.e. "it's been done" and was by then down to where it could
usually be made to work, even with modems and TPC in the way) to have
an ASCII terminal talking to the Univac 1108. (Actually this was done
with some sort of front-end that had been in part developed at the
University of Maryland, hence had the name SMUCS but doggone if I can
remember what that stood for.) So it didn't try to be more than a
glass Teletype, and nobody thought to use it as anything more than one
-- mostly this arrangment got used to edit files using _at_ED (an
interactive editor, but still Teletype-oriented) and submit batch
jobs.

-Frank McConnell
Received on Fri May 19 2000 - 18:07:04 BST