14 Oct
2008
14 Oct
'08
12:57 p.m.
On 14 Oct 2008 at 2:01, Richard wrote:
> Just realized that this probably isn't a
B-100, but rather a Super Bee
> terminal.
The exact key layout and labelling was different for
the Super Bee
compared to what you see in that picture. At one point we had an
ASCII animation notes program running where people would edit and type
in their ASCII animations for playback on the terminal. I think that
might have been a first compared to what other people were doing with
public notes forums. As a time sharing shop, we were heavily
influenced by the udel PLATO installation that ran concurrently with
us. They had fancy graphics terminals, but we had Super Bees :-). I
remember these terminals failing in an interesting way when they
started to overheat. Bits in the display memory would start flipping
causing characters at random positions on the screen to spontaneously
change. We learned a quick key sequence that would clear the screen
and then request a repaint from the host in order to restore the
screen to sanity in the summer. (Our office didn't have air
conditioning, so we had to live with the summer heat and humidity.)
If you want to unload this "project", I'm happy to take it off your
hands :-).
It's been awhile since I owned a couple of SuperBees, but they used
welded-aluminum slab-sided cases and not the fiberglass one shown in
the photo. The whole front CRT area was covered with a sheet of
brown-tinted acrylic, held on with velcro-ish plastic fasteners. The
keyboard itself was parallel output ASCII and had two shades of beige
for most keys with yellow special-function keys. Several keys had
little round "windows" illuminated by bi-pin lamps. The keyboard
case could have been aluminum, but might also have been die-cast zinc-
-I don't recall, except that it didn't have the sharp corners the
main unit did.
The SuperBees were page-editing terminals; you could shoot a page of
text to it, edit it offline and then hit TRANSMIT to send the text
back to the host. It was also possible to get the terminal into a
state where you needed to cycle the power to get it out of some
unresponsive condition. When transmitting a page, 1F (hex) was used
as an EOL character.
CPU in these was an 8008 with shift-register storage.
Cheers,
Chuck