25 Mar
2018
25 Mar
'18
8:49 a.m.
On Sunday (03/25/2018 at 07:11AM -0700), Mark J. Blair via cctalk wrote:
Maybe there's some relationship to the SGI dial boxes?? I have an SGI
one but don't know anything about the IBM ones. They were built by
Danaher and Seiko and both SGI and Sun offered those models...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial_box
http://yehar.com/blog/?p=3471
https://github.com/hanshuebner/sgi-dialbox-usb/blob/master/dialbox.py
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist
On Mar 24, 2018, at 22:29, Michael Brutman via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Picture here: https://i.imgur.com/ClCw070.jpg <https://i.imgur.com/ClCw070.jpg>
Neat! I haven't seen one of those since 1987, when I briefly played with a
workstation that had one of those in an unguarded computer room in college. It was running
some sort of CAD demo in which you could rotate, translate, and scale a wireframe model
with the dials. I seem to recall that it was propped up diagonally on some sort of stand,
but I don't remember if that was a standard feature vs. something cobbled together
locally.
Good luck learning how to talk to it. I can think of a number of different applications
in which a physical interface like that might be nice. 