29 Apr
2011
29 Apr
'11
5:24 a.m.
--- On Fri, 4/29/11, vintagecoder at aol.com <vintagecoder at aol.com> wrote:
I personally would love to have a 4051, does anybody
remember those? Hi-res
green phosphor screens were made for graphics programming
and came with
their own dialect of BASIC. They were one piece units on
heavy stands and
had tape drives built into the console. Those were the
days!
Yeah, I've got one. Mine has no stand - unlike the 4010, the electronics for the 4051
are in the unit itself, not in the stand. It's really not a big device at all - very
deep, but not so big that it won't fit on a desk. Of course, the 4051 I have (as with
most, I would assume), has a faulty tape drive because the rubber driver wheel is shot.
The built in BASIC is pretty cool, and the graphic routines are fun to play with, but
without the ability to save programs, it's kind of annoying.
What I really want to find is a 4010/4014 terminal. That way, I have a lot more
programming flexibility. Anyone got one on this coast? :)
Similarly, if anyone has a wrecked 4051 or parts, mine is missing both the shift keys and
the Enter keys. I have no idea why, and I've seen another Tek storage tube device,
many years later, missing exactly the same keys. Was there some kind of shift key recall
or something?
-Ian