strange find!

From: Rick Bensene <rickb_at_bensene.com>
Date: Fri Apr 20 11:00:51 2001

I know that for a long time, Tektronix used PDP-11's as the controllers for
their automated circuit test systems. I'm guessing that these may have been
overlays that would go on the front panel of an 11/34 or similar beast that
used a numeric keypad and other keypad controls, and 7-segment displays as
the 'front panel' of the machine rather than earlier switches and
blinkenlights.


Tek made a lot of test systems that were very complex. Bed-of-nails
fixtures
with all kinds of signal generators and digitizers that would allow a
circuit
board to be fully exercised under the control of a test program.
These were really amazing machines. Some of the later systems ran RSX-11
if I remember right. The earlier ones sat on top of RSTS or perhaps even
custom operating systems.


Back in the mid-70's, there were PDP-11's stuffed everywhere at Tek.
There were also some PDP-8's. I remember seeing a large PDP-8/I system at
one point, as well as quite a number of PDP-8/E machines. I remember
that the 8/I was just sitting there...not powered up, and looked like it
hadn't been in a very long time. I asked one of the guys that worked in
the area (the circuit board CAD group), and he said that it hadn't been
run in a long time, and someday they'd get rid of it. The coolest
part is that the console on the system was an old original Tek 4002 Graphics
Terminal...the first DVST terminal that Tek made. They were amazing
terminals.
Had hardware character scaling and rotation. All early SSI/MSI logic, as I
recall. Big beasts...very heavy. I used to play with these old terminals
all the time. Sure wish I could find one today.

I remember
once seeing a PDP-11 system (can't remember which model, but it had
traditional switches and LED front panel) running
something called WDO Tek BASIC. It essentially turned a PDP-11 into
a programmable digitizing oscilloscope (with added custom interfaces for
the waveform digitizer and waveform memory). The system had a Tek 4010
(maybe
4012, can't remember) graphics terminal connected up to it, which served
as the 'display' for the captured waveforms. Using the BASIC environment,
which Tek designed with a bunch of signal processing functionality, you
could do all kinds of analysis and manipulation of the captured waveforms.
Pretty amazing stuff for the time.

Sorry for rambling through the memories...

Rick Bensene
The Old Calculator Web Museum
http://www.geocities.com/oldcalculators


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
> [mailto:owner-classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org]On Behalf Of Joe
> Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 9:10 PM
> To: classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org
> Subject: strange find!
>
>
> I helped a friend of mine pick up a load of surplus stuff today and one
> of the items that I got was a bag of keyboard overlays that came from
> Tektronix. The Tektronix tag on the bag is dated 1973 says that
> they're for
> a PDP-11! The overlays appear to be for a numeric pad or
> something similar.
> They have cutouts for four rows with four keys in each row. The overlays
> are all marked as "User Definable" so the key positions are
> unmarked except
> for Cont, Reset and CPU Busy in the last three positions in the
> bottom row.
> There are four orange color overlays, five yellow overlays and five blue
> overlays in the package. Does anyone know what these are four????
>
> Joe
>
Received on Fri Apr 20 2001 - 11:00:51 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:28 BST