Anyone familiar with these vintage touchscreens?

[Nigel Johnson]

You are probably right about the 6809, the stuff I worked on was all in 
the development stages for the project, and at the server end.  I did 
field engineering for Transduction, and we supplied equipment to Norpak, 
although I can't for the life of me remember what!  I remember going to 
visit their headquarters in Pakenham and was surprised to find it was a 
set of farm outbuildings!  That was the NORton family of PAKenham, 
whence they got the name.

The development system from Carling Drive in Ottawa was transferred to 
Bell's Simcoe Street office in Toronto when they went live, and I got a 
service call there to work on the DMAX/16s again, as somebody ad removed 
the remote diagnostics panel from the PDP11/70  and forgot to replace 
the NPG jumper on the backplane, causing bus hangs.

cheers,

Nigel (for people who knew me back then, I was called 'Bill' Johnson!)



On 20/10/2019 15:09, Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote:
> On 2019-Oct-20, at 9:14 AM, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote:
>> On 20/10/2019 06:43, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 02:23:46PM -0400, Nigel Johnson via cctalk 
>>> wrote:
>>>> Judging by the year, it was probably a teletext terminal. [...]
>>> It's not Teletext, unless that word means something different on the 
>>> other side
>>> of the Pond. Teletext was basically a text system (the hint's in the 
>>> name) with
>>> graphics (and indeed colour) being a weird hack that gave it a 
>>> particular
>>> appearance, especially in typical implementations which used the SAA5050
>>> character generator chip.
>>>
>>> The palette and colour fringing suggest Apple II to me.
>> It was called teletext despite the implications, at least here in 
>> Canada. People just couldn't get their tongue around NAPLPS!
>>
>> It looks just like the teletext systems I worked on, maybe ours was 
>> better than yours?
>
> For elucidation, here's an example of a Canadian Telidon terminal with 
> display examples:
> http://madrona.ca/e/telidon/index.html
>
> (The processor is indeed a 6809, as Diane was mentioning.)
>
> Graphics was very much a part of the Telidon/NAPLPS protocol.
> (Note: Colour capabilities may differ between terminals, the protocol 
> was such as to permit a range of compatible implementations.)
>
> While the store directory terminal of the OP 'could' have been a 
> Telidon/NAPLPS terminal, I'd be placing my bets more on the Apple-II 
> (or similar) as others mentioned. Strikes me more as a standalone 
> unit. I think using a videotex/teletext/Telidon/NAPLPS terminal would 
> have been awkward and the economics poor, there'd either have to be a 
> rented comm line to a remote server, an additional local server, or 
> storage hacked onto the terminal.
>
> The touch-screen is another issue, while it could have been supported 
> in a proprietary manner I'm not aware of explicit support for 
> touch-screens in the protocol.
>
> I believe the NAPLPS designation (designation as an industry standard) 
> came rather late in the game, an attempt to gain some recognition for 
> a dying project. As "Telidon", it had begun years earlier.
>

-- 
Nigel Johnson
MSc., MIEEE
VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU

Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!


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