16 Feb
2008
16 Feb
'08
1:37 p.m.
Josh Dersch wrote:
Hey all --
Picked up an old dumb terminal (and I feel secure in calling this one
"old") today at Re-PC in Tukwila, WA (I'm starting to really dig this
place...). It's a CDC, labeled on the back as a "Display Terminal" (go
figure), Equip. Id #CC5A5-A, Series Code 2, Part #15551800. I haven't
been able to find any information on this beast at all on the 'net.
I've put up some pictures here:
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/cdcterminal/ (Haven't had a chance
to clean it up yet, so it's kinda smudgy...)
My favorite thing about this terminal is the huge, backlit buttons on
the front for Power, etc... very cool :). I've powered it up after
giving it a check-out, and it appears to work fine. I haven't hooked it
up to a serial line yet, but that's coming... maybe Linux has a termcap
entry for this thing? :)
Opening it up reveals repair tags with dates in 1974. There are four
PCBs mounted inside, connected by a ton of ribbon connectors (there's no
backplane to speak of). Looks like it's all TTL, though I haven't taken
the boards out to investigate. Not sure I want to disturb them :).
Anyone know anything about this thing? What's it capable of? What was
it originally connected to?
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.)