From: Josh Dersch
I actually used one of those at CDC ca. 1974-75. You got the good
version--there was a version with a reduced linecount on it (8?). At
Sunnyvale ops, we had a roomful of them connected to the STAR-100
Cyber frontend in Arden Hills. At the time, department policy
wouldn't allow a terminal to reside on one's desk, so we had a
"terminal room". I think we ran them at 300 bps from a 9600 bps
link. I wrote the Star OGNATE text editor to operate with one of
these--and to see how creative I could get with all of those great
STAR string and vector instructions. Much to my horror, I found the
editor still in use at ETA in 1985. (OGNATE, BTW, stands for "Oh G-d,
not another text editor"). IIRC, the terminal was very "dumb".
At the time, I was also project manager for the STAR remote MCU. The
thing that I best recall was that the engineer at the Arden Hills end
took forever to design his own UART from SSI. It ran at some oddball
speed, like 1800 bps.
Cheers,
Chuck