Do you have a Tektronix 4010? Want a screen capture for it?

In article <515507.71579.qm at web82706.mail.mud.yahoo.com>, Bob Rosenbloom <bobalan at sbcglobal.net> writes: OK, since you're interested, I'll go into a little more detail of what I was thinking... In the 4010/4014 terminals (and probably more, but I've only read the service manuals for those two) there is a little bit of additional circuitry that is installed into the terminal to support the printer. This is the "-1" designation, i.e. 4010 is just the terminal without printer circuitry and 4010-1 is the terminal with the printer support circuitry. This terminal circuitry was only available from the factory and not as a user-installable option AFAIK. As I understand it the 4631 hardcopy unit is entirely an analog circuitry affair. It generates three input signals to the terminal and the printer support circuitry in the terminal generates a response signal. The hard copy unit generates a "slow ramp" that scans the tube from top to bottom and a "fast ramp" that scans from left to right many times within the slow ramp. This in effect runs a scanning beam in a raster type pattern across the type. The third signal generated by the hard copy unit is a sense signal that is sent to the terminal to read out the tube at the location indicated by the current values of the slow and fast ramps. The terminal sends a response to the hard copy unit, which it uses to turn into an image on a drum with the paper. My idea was to either a) cannibalize the ramp generation circuitry out of the 4631 and interface that to a microcontroller that digitized the response from the terminal, or b) use the ramp generation circuitry diagrams for the 4631 to create an equivalent modern circuit driven by the microcontroller which digitzed the return value from the terminal. The microcontroller would probably use USB to attach to a host or something like that. So you would press your hard copy switch on the terminal and the microcontroller would scan through the tube by generating the fast and slow ramps, digitize the responses and turn this into a bitmap that would be available to the host. Presto! Screen capture from your 4010-1/4014-1. A followon idea would be to create the necessary printer support circuitry in the terminal using the service manual schematics so that people could "upgrade" their 4010 to a 4010-1. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>