Douglas Quebbeman wrote:
>
> > On 2002.03.26 12:55 Hans Franke wrote:
> >
...
> > And that reminds me of the Tektronix ASCII Terminal I rescued lately.
> > Characters are drawn only once and the analog "memory" display tube
> > keeps the dots fluoresceing. No screen refresh! This is one of the
> > Terminals where you can see that Tektronix is well known for
> > oscilloscopes...
>
> This was Tek's "Storage Tube" technology... or something like that.
>
> We had a o-scope at school which used it... never got to work
> with the computer displays that had it, tho...
Yes, storage tube was the official word. I had what today may be
considered the honor of using a 4014 several years ago. The graphics
command language of the 40xx terminals did set a standard for
generations to come, because it was effective (you packed chunks of four
or six coordinate bits into bytes) and avoided trouble by making sure
only printable characters were used (except for the DEL that could
sometimes occur). Somewhat similar to what today's MIME standard does
with Base64 encoding. You could even leave out (not send) certain bit
groups if they hadn't changed. Very compact.
2400 baud was a perfectly reasonable speed for a graphics terminal, and
you could go even faster...
Unfortunately, I have only manuals left from that aera, and one or two
terminals with a "Tek emulation" graphics mode. Even the VT240 could do
that, but on that screen, it looked ugly, compared to it's native ReGIS.
The only original Tek that I own is a far more modern 412x (haven't
looked closely for a long time).
--
Andreas Freiherr
Vishay Semiconductor GmbH, Heilbronn, Germany
http://www.vishay.com
Received on Tue Mar 26 2002 - 13:33:31 GMT