14 Jul
2011
14 Jul
'11
10:29 a.m.
On 14 Jul 2011 at 7:05, Rick Bensene wrote:
According to the text, the system used Bunker-Ramo
Teleregister Model
203 display stations with a "full alphanumeric keyboard, a bank of
function keys, and a CRT screen on which twelve lines of 32 characters
each may be presented". Was the photo of a 203?
There's not a lot about early BR stuff out there, but I thought the
terminal was a 213; I think the display on the 203 was larger.
Were the characters on these terminals stroke
generated, or raster? It
seems that a lot of early character displays were either stroke
generated, or used charactron(sp?) tubes (electron beam first directed
through a mask with character stencils, then deflected to the correct
position on the screen), with raster coming later.
A mix of both technologies, I think. The CDC 200 UT from 1968 or so
used a 5x7 dot matrix, but the console display was pure vector. I
don't know about the BR 200 series, however.
It's a shame that BR doesn't get much mention (Bitsavers has the BR
documents in the TRW folder for some reason). They had some
remarkable gear, including an industrial process control computer in
1959, not to mention the jewel in the crown--the NASDAQ trading
system.
--Chuck