On Thu, 31 May 2007 14:56:37 -0700, "Rick Bensene" <rickb at bensene.com> wrote: [...] TEC was a Tucson, AZ based company that IIRC started out producing the logic-controlled, neon indicator lights that populated the fronts of IBM 360s and the like. Seeing the writing on the wall they branched into terminals and keyboards. The first terminals were upper case only. I was at the UofAZ computer center in the mid '70s visiting friends when one of TEC's folks brought in a new prototype upper/lower case terminals that we immediately hooked up to the local DEC10. We soon discovered that they used lower case for control codes... They really never got thing right. In the late 70's they spent a pile developing a mini which I, along with a group from the UofA were invited to evaluate. Seems that they invented the PDP8 right after the Nova 1200 and PDP11 had been released with a selling price higher than either of the competition. The indicator business died and they went under in the early '80s IIRC. Their legacy was a Superfund cleanup site... CRC