Judging by the year, it was probably a teletext terminal. There were
various field trials of such systems around that era. We had one in
Toronto's Eaton Centre - it was based on NAPLPS, and used a PDP11/23.
There was a lot of Canadian Government money put into research to
promote he Canadian vector-based protocol, claimed to be more efficient
than the European alpha-mosaic ones. Ours ran at 1200/150(?) baud.
Research was done at a Bell Canada site on Carlingview Avenue in Ottawa
under some sort of sub-contract. They used Able DMAXes on an 11/70
which had a pot to adjust the 150 baud clock. They actually flew me up
from Toronto, with a scope, to adjust that pot, since everybody there
was hands-off this external stuff.
It may have had a future if HTTP and the internet were not just around
the corner:-)
One of the big players in Canada was Infomart, where I installed a bunch
of kit on PDP11s, just around the corner from where I now live in Toronto.
cheers,
Nigel
On 19/10/2019 14:02, Jonathan Katz via cctalk wrote:
Hi!
I saw this crop up on twitter and now I’m curious. Anyone familiar with
these? Any idea what the backend was?
https://twitter.com/newsfedora/status/1154813199054712833?s=21
--
Nigel Johnson
MSc., MIEEE
VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
You can reach me by voice on Skype: TILBURY2591
If time travel ever will be possible, it already is. Ask me again yesterday
This e-mail is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me
to you, it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number
of system administrators along the way.
Nigel Johnson <nw.john...@ieee.org>
Please consider the environment when deciding if you really need to print
this message
