16 Feb
2008
16 Feb
'08
6:20 p.m.
Brent Hilpert wrote:
Well, it looks just like the surplus one we acquired
in my high school
electronics lab ca 1977, and which we connected up as the console to a Motorola
MEK 6800 board. I got to take it home over one summer, wrote some (manually
assembled) cassette-tape storage routines for it.
If it's the same as the one I recall playing with, it was a fairly 'typical'
remote (note the CTS indicator) time-sharing terminal of the early 70's: RS232
with modem control lines, printer port, may have been upper-case only - don't
remember for certain.
..pull the boards and check the date codes and technology of the ICs. Nice
find, IMHO, those random-logic pre-microproc CRT terminals are getting pretty
rare, most of them were scrapped by the late 70's/early 80's.
(If I may make a general request to people when putting up photos like this,
resizing them if possible (they're all near to 2MB), down to something sensible
for casual perusal/download would be helpful to some.)
(.. I like the big old "No. 6 Ignitor" dry cells in the background,
haven't
seen any of those since the 60's.)
Apologies for the huge file sizes, I always forget to put up smaller
files for that sort of thing :).
I'll attempt to pull the boards out this weekend once I clear off some
more space on the bench. I've powered the terminal up (checked the
power supply out and it seems to be working great) and hooked it up to
my Linux box and it seems to work almost perfectly. There's some bad
RAM (assuming this thing uses RAM), though -- a couple of character
cells show up incorrectly (dropping the lowest two bits). And by "a
couple" I mean exactly two :). The display needs a few capacitors
replaced, but the picture's still very good given the age.
The terminal seems to provide an 80x16 character display of both upper
and lower-case letters. It has some sort of memory expansion option
installed, according to tags in the case... I have no idea what extra
functionality that gives it. There's also a huge empty space below the
monitor/cardcage/power supply which seems to have been meant for some
additional expansion options, it'd be interesting to know what those were...
Josh