CRT displays [was: computer graphics in the 1950s]

Well...one without deflection plates is rather difficult to use as a vector display, but that's a matter of complicated and unconventional driving electronics more than a matter of possibility proper. (Or, I suppose, one could use electrostatic deflection with the deflection plates outside the vacuum envelope, but that gets interesting in other ways.) But, that aside, if you want to use that narrow a definition of CRT, then no, characters are never sent to any CRT, Charactron or not; it's all voltage levels. I suppose you could view the voltage levels sent to a Charactron's pre-mask deflection electrodes as an encoding of a character; this point of view has some justice to it, since you could equally well say that a serial line doesn't carry characters, just voltage waveforms - but in that case you can view the relevant inputs to any CRT that's displaying a character as an encoding of that character, so it's really a question of which point of view is most useful. But I think we already got an explanation upthread that basically said it depended on software's view of it, making it more a question of design intent than anything else, since either "graphics" or "character" can be pressed into service as the other.... /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B