15 Jul
2016
15 Jul
'16
11:04 p.m.
On Jul 15, 2016, at 9:34 PM, Eric Smith <spacewar at gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
The PLATO IV terminals had a 512x512 addressable pixels, local charset memory (Font)
and the ease and power of TUTOR to support them. It still amazes me how much
work and fun we extracted from the limited cpu, memory, storage and communication
bandwidth we had.
Oh and those keyboards. Best damn ones I?ve ever used.
Jerry
I remember, around the same time, the Tektronix
4010. But that was
far less flexible; it could only draw, not erase, unlike the PLATO terminals.
The 4010 can erase just fine. The problem is that it can't do
selective erase, only
full-screen erase, and erasing is a slow operation.
Tektronix had other models that could do both storage and refresh
graphics, but they were even more expensive. The refresh capabilities
tended to be fairly limited.