Oddball Terminals (Was: Re: VT100's)

[Mark J. Blair]

A long time ago, I had the incomplete remnants of an oddball terminal which I retrieved from a junk pile at a small, obscure school in Pasadena. I'll try to describe it as best I can, based on old memory. I could have sworn that it had a dataplate label identifying it as a DEC VT02, but that could be way off the mark.

It was built around a Tektronix vector storage display, oriented in portrait mode. It had quite a bit of screen burn from its long life displaying text. I don't recall the model number of the display, but I might recognize one if I saw it. It was quite long, making the whole terminal quite long. It had X, Y and Z BNC inputs, and it had a neat test mode that drew a spiral on the screen.

The display sat on top of a long chassis with a keyboard at one end, a small Flip Chip backplane around the middle, and a power supply (probably linear, IIRC) at the rear end. I don't think that the Flip Chip boards were still in it when I got it, but it came along with a small box of spare Flip Chips.

After setting the big Tektronix display on top of the lower chassis, there was a long U-shaped sheet metal cover that sat over the top and covered the display, making it look somewhat like a single device rather than a stack of two things. The lower chassis and the top cover were painted approximately white as I recall.

I never did anything interesting with the display other than occasionally driving it with signal generators, and I got rid of the whole pile a long, long time ago.

Does that old beast sound remotely familiar to anybody here? How hard should I kick myself for not keeping it?

-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/