15 Apr
2014
15 Apr
'14
11:04 a.m.
On Apr 15, 2014, at 1:02 PM, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
Fair enough.
I?m not sure
about Bill?s comment that "it is one of the most sought after terminals that a
serious collector could actually acquire.? If I were looking for a PLATO terminal, the
last place I would look is the CDC ISTs. Those were always weird mongrels. ?Real PLATO
terminals have plasma panels.? :-)
These earlier PLATO terminals, however, are extremely unobtainable.
The IST-IIs, on the other hand, are still out in the wild in small
quantities. Serious collectors of terminals could expect, after some
amount of legwork, to get an IST-II for their collection, but could
not reasonable expect to get one of the plasma types.
From my not-a-dedicated-terminal-collector perspective, what other
reasonably obtainable terminals are as high on the list as the CDC
IST-IIs? DEC VT05, IBM 2260*, early Tek 4000, maybe a Uniscope? Just
about all the other collectable terminals would be quite a bit further
down the list.
VT71t ? There probably were no more than a few thousand of those made, but that?s not a
horribly tiny number. Figuring out how to make one talk would be a challenge, though.
paul