Keyboard for Cifer T5 terminal. - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

11 Feb 2002

Paul Williams wrote:
...
 Pete Turnbull wrote:
 On Feb 9, 13:46, Paul Williams wrote:
 Is there any form of address for Cifer on the
terminal? I don't
even know which country they came from. 
 The UK.  A friend of mine went to work for them for a while in the
 late '80s, but I know very little more about them.  Except that they
 made some quite cool black terminals, one of which I had until
 recently. 
You actually get rid of stuff occasionally? Shocking behaviour.

It appears that Cifer made terminals and CP/M boxes. I haven't checked
the termcaps, but it appears that some were VT100-compatible (the ones I
used at Poly) and some weren't. 
Not adding any useful information, but I remember using a Cifer CP/M
box at school (donated by a local major pharmaceuticals company IIRC,
who didn't go to any of the trouble of deleting anything :-).  Came with
a massive 10MB hard disk and a 5.25" floppy, and a little greenscreen
all in a single unit.

We opened one up (after it had blown the magic blue smoke - the foam
'filter' on the cooling fans at the back had jammed the fan blades and
it overheated rather horribly.)  At the time I couldn't get over the
fact that it had a Z80 for the main processor, but a 68000 (IIRC)
driving the display hardware...  As a 680x0 bigot, that always seemed
the wrong way round :-).

Cheers,
Tim.

-- 
Tim Walls at home in Croydon     -     Reply to tim(a)snowgoons.fsnet.co.uk