what the heck is it

On 17 Nov 2007 at 17:17, jim s wrote: Google on "Lexitron Raytheon" or consult "Raytheon; The first 60 years" by Earls and Edwards. After 1978, Lexitron was a divisoin of RDS in OA (word processing). The acquisition of Lexitron in 1977 was a huge blunder on Raytheon's part and the operation was pretty much gone by the mid-80's. A shame really that the history of OA from the 1960's onward is pretty much forgotten. Lexitron was the product of "boy genius" Stephen Kurtin back in 1970 and went public in 1972. A floppy version of the Lexitron WP equipment didn't appear until 1978; prior to that time, document storage was on tape; around 1980, the Lexitron name was dropped, IIRC. AFAIK, Lexitron gear used its own operationg system. Talk about history vanishing...I found only two mentions of Artec International on Google--and only just in passing. But in 1977, we were using their WP gear and it was pretty nice--basically rebadged Diablo Hyterms with a small (1 or 2 line) LCD display and a floor- standing unit with the CPU and 8" floppy drives. If you went one step up, you could get a video display for one. IIRC, in 1977 dollars, one would set you back about $10K+. Shame that no one collects this stuff. It created a revolution in the corporate office. Before the advent of WP and OA in general, it was typewriters and steno pads (does anyone still know Gregg shorthand?) Cheers, Chuck