Humpty Dumpty

In article <f4eb766f0702081242s185c172akadce74d7a9d981e9 at mail.gmail.com>, "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes: Great, I'll keep that in mind. Just as I was composing a reply to the list, I stumbled across this site which seems to have the very early TTY style portion of this history covered: North American Data Communications Museum <http://www.nadcomm.com/index.html>. I guess I hadn't stumbled across it before because it focuses on the Teletype and sort of leaves off where terminals begin. Ah. I notice that old-computers.com doesn't have anything on their PCs so you might consider submitting some basic information to them for the PC portion. (I've tried submitting information on terminals, but they reject it as "outside their scope", although they have the ADM-3A in their database.) I'd heard of the LCD displays under that name, but you know how company names tend to get recycled in our industry, you can't always depend that its the same manufacturer. They are essentially the same terminal, but the 4205 has a little more memory and a little faster processing and a slightly smaller case although the tubes seem to be the same size. They are both color raster displays. They have an integrated pointing "puck" built into the keyboard so that does make them a little unusual. There is also this DE-9 (D subminiature) style connector on the keyboard teasingly labelled "mouse", but I've never been able to find out any information on just what kind of mouse you can connect to it. Yeah, I get the impression that the kinds of programs written for these terminals died with the minicomputers and mainframes that ran them. Just think of the hard time Al Kossow has finding old software for vintage machines and multiply the level of difficulty by 10 or even 100 because for as many people as there were with minis and mainframes, it seems that only a small fraction of them did anything with graphics. Nowadays everything has "graphics", but back then it was a significant sum on top of the already significant sum for the computing hardware that you really had to be able to justify the expense. Things like CAD could justify it, but they would be running custom software (now CAD is a commodity, but before the PC I got the impression that each engineering house developed their own CAD system inhouse). The companies that created their own CAD software aren't likely to let their old machines slip out the door with the software still loaded, although I'm sure it happened on occasion. Yeah, the market window for high-end 3D terminals was a small one, I think. That's what makes them interesting to collect from my perspective :-). I am still amazed that I managed to get the color Megatek terminal. -- "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/>