Um, 2 years, right.
You're correct, I do have a CDC Plato ISP/MET terminal. Someone wrote 3-72
on one of the stickers inside the terminal, but several boards I checked
appeared to have IC's from 78 or 79. The boards could well have
been updated, since I received the terminal from a CDC employee in
the early 80's.
Does anyone have any manuals for this terminal?
Just for the heck of it, I just snapped a couple digital pictures as the
terminal sits in my closet:
http://www-users.itlabs.umn.edu/~lemay/computers/plato
-Lawrence LeMay
This is two years late, but the terminal the original
poster describes
sounds like an IST (model 1), a CRT-based CDC product, vintage about 1978.
There was a later edition called the IST-II, also CDC. It had two 8" drives
and a Z-80 CPU, as well as connectivity to CDC PLATO mainframe systems,
either by dialup modem (1200 bps) or multiplexer.
The IST is not the oldest PLATO terminal, but it is the oldest that CDC
manufactured, I suspect. Even my PLATO IV (Magnavox, 1971) is not the
oldest, but only the first mass-produced machine. The earliest ones date to
about 1961 and there are probably only two or three still in existence, if
we're lucky enough to have that many. A precursor to these would be Norman
Crowder's Auto-Tutor, vintage about 1958, which has characteristics very
similar to the PLATO terminals (though it is not a computer terminal, it
operates on filmstrip media), and PLATO's mechanisms are said to have been
influenced by this machine.
Peter Zelchenko (pete(a)suba.com)
Chicago, Illinois