8 Feb
2007
8 Feb
'07
12:07 p.m.
In article <f4eb766f0702081150s67fda50ak573058800e1ef27b at mail.gmail.com>,
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes:
I don't think Tektronix ever made a terminal that wasn't graphics
capable :-) and when they went to raster displays from storage scopes,
I believe they were all color capable. I have a 4010, a 4014 and
several 4105s and 4205s.
There are the E&S terminals and the other "CAD terminal" vendors of
the 80s. SGI's first product was such a terminal, before they started
doing workstations in their second generation product line. I don't
know that Tektronix ever had a terminal with 3D builtin, but Megatek
made stuff in that category and I believe the AED 512 also had 3D
builtin. It was the display list based stuff and was the precursor
to the graphics workstation.
I have two Megateks: a black and white model and a color model, both
of which have 3D locally. The intent was that you'd load the model
into the terminal's memory and then it wasn't very much bandwidth to
respond to user input and send down new transformation matrices to
update the position/orientation of the models in the terminal's
memory. If you are familiar with GKS and PHIGS, its mental model of
doing computer graphics maps very nicely onto these terminals (no
surprise there).
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
On 2/8/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com>
wrote:
Pictures? Web site? I intend to do a full online history of terminals
at some point; something like old-computers.com but just for terminals
(there are enough varieties and manufacturers to justify such a huge
database; have you ever browsed the TERMCAP stuff? There's tons of
terminals out there, but most are rather boring.)
I've not heard of Planar before, so I'd like to hear about that one.
As near as I can tell, there are like 3 people
who care about
terminals: myself, Paul Shuford (who is the only source of online
information about many kinds of terminals) and Paul Williams (who runs
and maintains vt100.net).
4. I have a collection of terminals, 90% of which are various DEC
models (VT-50 through about VT-320), but a couple of Tektronix, couple
of Planar, Heathkit, CiTOH, etc. Most terminals
do not have graphics capability, just character
capability. Color graphics terminals are even scarcer.
I'd have to check the stack, but the Tektronix terminals are color
graphics + text (local printer port, etc.), and of course, the VT241
is color graphics + text, as is the DEC GIGI.
The 340s occasionally appear on ebay, but they generally sell for
around $350, so I haven't purchased one yet.
I agree - they are
rare. Rarer are the applications to drive them.
Oh, I don't know of any extant applications that still care about
these kinds of terminals unless we're talking about something as
mundane as unix plot. (Although linux seems to have discarded all
that terminal functionality that was in the original plot series of
programs and just reduced it to Tektronix 4010.)
However, since the escape codes are documented in the user manuals
and the manuals seem to have survived fairly well for most models, I
am intending to write code that will put them through their paces via
an ordinary PC.
Terminals
that have 3D graphics builtin are even scarcer than that.
Indeed. I don't know if I've ever seen one.