25 Apr
2006
25 Apr
'06
2:30 a.m.
At 11:11 PM 4/24/06 -0400, der Mouse wrote:
OK now go back and put the rest of the message back in. The part where
we were talking about a Tektronix 4041 and weather to use it's "display"
and "keyboard" or to use a PC as a terminal for it. Then go take a look at
<http://www.classiccmp.org/hp/Tektronix%204041/Tektronix%204041.jpg>* so
that you'll know what the hell you're talking about! You obviously have
never used a Tektronix 4041! It has a single line LED display and a FEW
keys on the front panel and that's it. No a PC isn't a CAD system with
oddles of display memory, frame buffers and a touch type keyboard but it
still beats the hell of what the 4041 uses!
FWIW yes there was a "real" programmer's keyboard that was made for the
4041. But try to find one!! I had one, I took me about five years of
dedicated searching to find it. I'd be willing to bet that no one on the
list has one. They are SCARCE! A friend of mine is a real Tektronix
collector and has probably 25 4041s but even he didn't have a keyboard till
I gave him mine.
*The display is hard to read in the picture ut it says "VER. 2.0 MEM-512K
". That's about the limit of what the display is capable of.
Joe
> IMO
You're MUCH better off with the PC! You have a good display,
*snerk* You need a C&C warning on things like that!
Good display? The platform that drove XFree86's madness? Where you
*can't* just have a memory-mapped framebuffer? Where the situation is
so chaotic that user-land programs are doing their own bus enumeration
(!!) to deal with the mess?? Where half the displays available don't
even have documentation!?
I'm used to Suns. You start X, it maps the framebuffer and it all Just
Works. It's not software subtrefuge, either; I've looked at all the
relevant code, clear from building my own ddx layer in the X server all
the way to the mmap routine in the driver, and it really is as simple
as it sounds. I've tried on two different occasions to get X working
on peecee-family hardware, and the best I ever managed was 320x200.
> a real keyboard
Where did you find a real keyboard for a peecee? Or did you just do
the level-shifter thing and hang the real keyboard off a serial port?