Tektronix 4014-1 & unknown cards

The 4081 was a complete system, in a "desk" format. The CPU was an Interdata 7/16, not a 7/32. The CPU, Memory, Graphics Processor (supporting both display-list vector refresh graphics and DVST-style stored graphics), and I/O interfaces were housed inside a chassis in the desk. The display was a high-performance DVST tube that sat on the desktop, along with the keyboard and joystick. The 4081 was not integrated into a 4014-style chassis. The unidentified board may well be an Interdata CPU as suggested. There were some systems that I saw that provided local intelligence within a 4014 terminal housing, but I can't recall if these were just prototypes, or actually made it into production. I do recall a machine similar to a 4014 that used dual 8-inch floppy drives (mounted beneath the CRT), and ran a version of CP/M, and I know that it made it into production, but didn't use an Interdata processor, and I can't recall what the model of the machine was. If I remember right, it used an 8086 processor. Whatever it is, it's unusual. I worked at Tektronix from '77 until '90, and saw a lot of really neat stuff that was developed, but never turned into product. I knew the 4081 system quite well, as I did a lot of programming (in assembly and PASCAL) on the system. It was a pretty neat system for its time, provided a lot of processing as well as graphics power in a nicely integrated system. I recall Wangtek front-load cartridge disk drives (two of them) in most of the systems that I worked with. The operating system was, IIRC, called GCOS. There was a very powerful macro assembler, FORTRAN, and PASCAL compilers. GCOS had a simple filesystem (8.3 filenames), and did offer a hierarchical directory structure. The text editor, if I recall correctly, was a clone of TECO. The graphics processor was pretty neat, it operated on a display list stored in main memory. You'd create graphics instructions in memory, and them point the display processor at them, and it'd go about generating the display. The display processor could do simple stuff like points and vectors, as well as higher-level objects like rectangles and polygons. The systems I worked on were used for Tek's in-house computer-aided design tools for stuff like circuit board layout, schematic capture, and the like. The vector graphics were used for dynamic objects, and static things were drawn in storage mode. Rick Bensene The Old Calculator Museum http://oldcalculatormuseum.com Bill Maddox wrote: http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/clevescorner/dec 04.html