On 9/6/2018 10:38 PM, Mark J. Blair via cctalk wrote:
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?
The display was most likely a Tektronix 611. DEC used them with their
point plot display systems like the VC8E.
Bob
--
Vintage computers and electronics
www.dvq.com
www.tekmuseum.com
www.decmuseum.org
