Chromatics on ebay (Al Kossow)

[John Wallace]

>On 7/25/15 8:24 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 7/24/15 1:14 PM, pdaguytom . wrote:
>>> Back on TAS for just shy of a grand with free shipping.
>>>
>>>
>> and someone bought it
>> http://www.ebay.com/itm/281757114979
>>
>>
>I've probably seen a dozen of them for sale in the 25+ years of watching
>this stuff, and what I've never seen is any software for either this or the
>68000 models.

Was there any software of note for Chromatics?

My first employer had already spent a fortune on one of the Z80 ones when I started in 1979 or so. It had some flavour of BASIC in ROM. I'm not sure the floppies were working by the time I arrived. It was owned by the electronics hardware design people. The software tools people (where I was) did all the serious work on PDP11 (RSX/IAS and RT11) and eventually VMS.

I left there in the mid 1980s. As far as I could tell the Chromatics had never really been used for anything more complex than a limited functionality large screen teletype emulator. Instead, low end LSI11 (including VT103) had been used for any serious work around the lab or around the factory, until PCs started to take over. I liked VT103s, but not so much the TU58s (we were one of the many sites that wrote something RSP-compatible that allowed use of centralised "remote disks" via serial lines, instead of the actual TU58s).

There's a bit more software (and documentation) for the PDP11 stuff, thank you :)

One thing the software people did buy in the mid 1980s which was great to watch was an Envision dot matrix tabletop colour printer/plotter, and an accompanying colour terminal (far superior to the VT24x of the same era). The printer used four separate ribbons and multiple passes over each line of text (if necessary) and spoke HPGL iirc as well as private text-mode escape sequences. The terminal was VT compatible and Tektronix 401x compatible at rather higher resolution. Nice stuff, but at maybe £3000 each they probably didn't sell many.

By that stage the Chromatics had vanished into a dark dusty corner.

regards
John Wallace

regards
John Wallace