On Sat, 18 Oct 2008, Christian Corti wrote:
This reminds me of the CRT display of a Cogar C4 (or
ICL/Friden 1501). It is
a standard 5" CRT with an almost ordinary deflection system. But the
deflection itself is rotated/mirrored, i.e. the "vertical" sweep is from left
to right and the "horizontal sweep" from top to bottom. So the display
controller writes all characters from the first text column first (and then
IIRC only the text lines 1,3,5 and 7). Then comes the next columns. After all
32 columns come the even text lines (there's a display mode which only
displays lines 1,2,3 and 4; the display has a 32 x 8 character cells). But
that's not all. There is a second horizontal deflection coil that interferes
with the first main deflection coil (I think this is called twiggle sweep or
something like that). This second coil deflects the beam according to the
width of one character cell, and one raster line of a character is written on
the screen during this time.
I must correct what I wrote last month. I was thinking of two different
systems. The Cogar indeed has a rotated deflection system, but only one
standard horizontal deflection coil.
In fact, I was thinking of the CRT display in the IBM 3742 data station
(see MIM number 306 and MAP 3.5). The character deflection is called
"Wiggle Sweep".
Christian