The Plato system

I managed to snag one of the plasma terminal modules (not the entire terminal - just the display guts with rear-projection screen) MANY years ago from Godbout. After acquiring it, I spend several weeks tracking down documentation and managed to obtain the manuals for the electrical and logic hookup, so "some day" I'm going to build me a terminal... a division of Corning. I'll dig up the docs and refresh my memory if anyone is interested. The module is about 12x12x8 inches, built mostly as a "square donut" with a recessed hole in the back where the rear-projection slide / reel machine would be placed. It's basically a 512x512 bit memory and is addressed digitally with a fairly simple parallel interface. What's kept me from powering it up is that it takes about four different (and some strange) voltages, one of which is about 180vdc for the plasma supply. Didn't want to power up until I had time to build supplies that conform to the specific requirements for slew and current limit. Didn't want "bad things" to happen on first power up. While a student programmer at Oregon State University MANY MANY years ago, I was involved in a project (never completed) that was to hook one or two of the terminals to our time-sharing system. Seemed to recall the "serial interface" level of the plato terminal required something like 18 bit "characters" sent TO the unit, with 12 bit "characters" coming FROM the unit. Was going to require some major work to force these through our 8 bit asynchronous frontend system. The "powers that be" decided it was too much effort and abandoned the project. -Gary