> "But the CRTs were actually vector displays, capable of more, under
> program control.
>
> "It's 2 o'clock in the morning. Halloween. Suddenly, the two screens
> go blank. Then two closed eyes appear. Slowly open. Eyeballs look
> slowly to the left, then slowly to the right -- then slowly stare
> straight ahead. Then eyelids slowly close, the two displays blank,
and
> go back to scrolling plain text.
>
> "Of course, nobody is going to believe the operator..."
On the Tektronix Cyber 73, running KRONOS, all one needed to do on the
console was type
X. EYES
and it'd run the program. It was a PPU program that temporarily
substituted for the PPU code
that ran the system status displays.
It was a cute "intro" demo when we'd have guests into the data center.
The Chess program was a great idle-time (swing shift operations) burner.
The displays had the chess board in the left display, and the running
move summary (along with other information, including a real-time
display of the move picking trees as the machine was coming up with its
move).
The 6600-based Cyber 73 system was really quite amazing for its day.
The Tektronix machine had a MODCOMP front-end communications processor,
and provided timeshared processing to a huge number of users across the
Tektronix campus, as well as the Walker Road and Wilsonville sites, via
microwave high-speed data links.
Those were definitely the "Good Old Days" for being an IT person.
Rick Bensene