Other Tek Terminals and other Tek reminiscing

Anyone seen a Tektronix 4023? It was Tek's first raster scan (versus Storage Scope) terminal. I think it was all TTL, no microprocessor, but not sure. 80x24 monochrome, white phosphor. It had its own control code set (no ANSI sequences at that time), quite different than the storage-scope terminals. I used at lot of these terminals at Tektronix. They were "computer user" areas sprinkled about in each building and floor. The user areas would have a selection of DVST terminals, which were used mostly for graphics and graphics programming work, and a few 4023's (later 4025's and 4027's). For text work (Fortran or Pascal programming) they were great. Initially, the terminals in the user area were hard-wired back to a giant panel of RS-232 connectors in the computer room, that hooked up to the Modcomp-based serial I/O subsystem for the Control Data Cyber 73. Later, they strung coax through the buildings, and used these interesting little shoe-box sized gizmos that were the forerunner of serial terminal servers. They had two serial ports on them, and talked over the coax to a big box in the computer room that had lots of RS-232 connectors that would be connected to the various computers. The coax network was not ethernet, to my knowledge. They were made by a company called Sytek. When you started a session, you would type in "CALL" followed by a space, then a 4-digit hexidecimal (IIRC -- maybe it was decimal) code for the system that you wanted to connect to, then hit RETURN. It'd connect you over the "network" to the appropriate machine. By then, there were some VAXen (11/780's) running VMS and BSD Unix, along with the old Cyber 73, and a later CDC Cyber-series (maybe a Cyber 176?) machine. Soon, the terminal network spread to Tektronix' new Wilsonville campus. I never worked at Wilsonville, but the had a bunch of DEC PDP-10 systems in their computer room in Wilsonville. I visited the data center there, and found the "CALL" codes for the Sytek network for the PDP-10's written down near a console, and remembered them. I tinkered about trying to get into some of the DEC 10's but never succeeded. I worked as a systems operator (the term used in those days) at the Scientific Computer Center at Tektronix' headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, from '77 until around '83. I mostly ran the Cybers during day shift at first, then later on night and weekend shifts. The Cybers were amazing, though the '73 was an all-transistorized machine, using core memory designed in the mid-1960's by Seymour Cray and friends. Its design was rather dated by the time I started running the machine, but it was still darned fast for the time. It could easily handle a few hundred simultaneous users under the KRONOS timeshared operating system. I once had the HV power supply in the operator's console of the Cyber 73 (famous dual-tube vector character (and graphics) console) fail catastrophically when I was sitting in front of it. Sparks and little molten balls of metal spewed out of the bottom of the housing for the CRTs onto the keyboard area of the "desk" the console was built into. Fortunately, the chair I was in had wheels, and when I saw the video collapse into a single bright point, then fade out on both tubes, I pushed off the console hard, and missed being burned. It was pretty scary at the time. Tektronix had a fire department dedicated to it, in one corner of the campus. The firemen showed up because the smoke detectors tripped, arming the Halon system. The halon dump was cancelled, but the firemen still came. There were giant (probably 8" tall) power vacuum tubes in the display power supply, and one of them had shorted. The on-site CDC repair guys (there was always at least on one-site during normal business hours, and they were always on call) had to fly in a new power tube, and also replace a bunch of other components. The failure happened in the morning, and the console was back in operation by late afternoon the same day. We had to run the machine from a 4023 terminal that was directly attached to the Cyber. That was "fun". Users used magtape a lot to store their stuff, as disk space was pretty limited (cost-centers had to pay for the disk space and CPU time they used out of their budgets), and there were almost constant requests for magtape mounts. The "emergency" console interface on the 4023 was pretty clunky, and it really slowed things down. The operators were proud of how fast they'd handle tape mount requests. We'd have contests to see who could get a tape found and mounted the fastest, and let the system know it was ready for use. The Cyber 73 had one old 7-Track magtape drive, and two nine-track drives. I think that the 7-Track was 800BPI, and the 9-Tracks could read/write 800BPI and 1200BPI tapes. Enough rambling. All I can say is that I sure had a good time, and learned a tremendous amount working as a "kid" at Tektronix (I started there 3 days after graduating from high school, at 18 years of age). Memories of those times are pretty deeply etched in my mind. The "good old days" of computing, they were. -Rick