5 Feb
2012
5 Feb
'12
3:52 p.m.
On 2/5/2012 2:18 PM, Richard wrote:
It just seems surprising that if these terminals were
made in large
quantities that there aren't any around in collections.
The thing a friend in
the TV business said at the time was that a lot of
these were made with a commercial tv set display set, rather than having
a display that was better suited to terminal use (constant on, bit more
rugged so it could be moved around, etc.) They also tended to gas up
and go bad. He didn't want one back in the day (late 70's early 80's)
because of that.
Also these RCA CRT's were a very long old design, not the later ProScan
/ RCA design with the flat screen short neck tube. The older tubes that
you got to have flat fronts were very deep for their purpose. The value
added to these was the programming capability.
When I had one, it was expensive to obtain much to make the programming
useful, so I sold mine off. I guess I had the Open Source mentality or
disposition back then, that if I couldn't get a manual, why bother there
are a lot of other toys that could do useful things w/o hassle. I got
it for quite a lot of money, and sold it for a profit, so I was happy.
Jim