I've been looking for a video or image that shows what font the original
Datapoint 2200 used.
It's not shown in the manual. There is one vintage image with the office
lady and the DP2200 on the desk- but the font isn't very clear in that.
In any modern video about the DP2200, none of them seem to power it on --
which is certainly understandable. From what I've read, the power supply
of that system is prone to failure. Also, the system is hard-coded to load
from Tape 1 -- which means both the tape drive, and tape media, still needs
to be in good working order (which would be pretty rare after this time).
In "the" DP2200 book, it only briefly mentions that the original tape
software was developed "on an HP system" (without any elaboration that I
could tell on which HP system that was).
Nothing in the manual suggests the original DP2200 could "program itself"
(i.e. no built in machine code monitor -- those TTL chips had one strict
boot up sequence: load from tape 1). If there was a read error or no tape
available, I'm curious if any message showed on the CRT.
So, I was just wondering if there was any known pre-1973 Datapoint 2200's
that are still working? (and/or if any HD video of them powered on and
legible font can be seen) Or any other more current system that we know
for sure used the same font?
Thanks!
-Steve