Help identifying Mystery CDC Terminal...

On 12 Apr 2012 at 20:47, Josh Dersch wrote: I didn't see the original post for this, so I ignored it. I spent a fair amount of time in front of one of those, circa 1975- 76. They came in several incarnations. One was a cost reduced version with every other line blank--that probably was the 16-line version. An up-version had 24 lines. We had a room at SVLOPS dedicated to these terminals connected to a leased 9600 bps line, run through a TDM to the STAR-100 at ADL in Arden Hills. All ran at 300 bps. But we had no connection to the MCU, so figuring out what was going on in case of a CPU fault (DEAD code) was an insane exchange over conference phone to the operator at ADL. "Okay, now tell me what's in register C4..." whereupon the operator would phonetically read a 64 bit hex number. On a machine with 48 bit addresses, 64 bit words and 256 registers, you could easily spend an hour gathering minimal information. I was detailed off to a project called the "Remote MCU". Basically, one of the engineers back at ADL worked up a UART card (from SSI components) that ran at 1800 bps. A bit of MCU code and an appropriation of bandwidth of the 9600 bps link and we were in business. It was a lifesaver. As terrible as the terminals were, they were still better than the 200 series terminals used on the EI/200 setups still in use. For one thing, they understood ASCII, not 6-bit display code. And they had more than 64 characters on a line. Management refused to put a terminal on one's desk back then. So you had to get your paperwork and go to the terminal room to work. It was horrible--some people could simply not avoid gabbing. I think I have the distinction of writing the first text editor for the STAR-100 for use on a slow terminal. I called it OGNATE--for "Oh G*d, not another text editor". The odd thing was that when a bunch of use got together to contract to ETA for a Fortran compiler circa 1984, OGNATE was still in use, even though the 700 series terminals were long gone, as were the specialized string instructions that made the editor interesting (the CYBER 201-203 and the ETA 10 actually had fewer instructions than the STAR-100). Some enterprising programmer had simply re-coded them as scalar sequences. I was stunned when I discovered that. --Chuck