11 Nov
2015
11 Nov
'15
6:54 a.m.
On Nov 10, 2015, at 8:43 PM, rod <rodsmallwood52 at
btinternet.com> wrote:
Hi
I always considered the VT05 to be art or sculpture.
However DEC never produced anything else in the same style.
They did, actually, but it was a rather obscure product: the VT20. That's a local
editing terminal for Typeset-11, for newspaper production. It consisted of two VT05
enclosures connected to an 11/05 controller. The whole thing was connected to the main
system (an 11/45 RSX11-D system) via a serial line.
I never saw one in action but there was one stored in the corner of the Typeset-11
development lab; by the time I got there (1978), it had been superseded by the VT71/t.
Same sort of idea, but a custom enclosure, and the controller was an LSI-11 inside that
enclosure, responsible for just one display rather than two.
The display controller was some sort of display list engine, vaguely like the GT40 but
text only. The host would send the entire file to the terminal, and receive the updated
file in response after the operator finished editing it. Imagine a VTEDIT or Emacs-like
editor, including programmable macro keys ("user defined keys") on your
desktop.
paul