When my Grandma worked for IBM in the 60’s in the programming department, debugging a program meant getting a printout of a memory dump from the IBM 1401 and going line by line to see what went wrong and then re-writing the program using her chart and then sending it to a secretary who would send it back to the punch card department and then waiting until your punchcard would be tested on one of the on-site machines. Wash, rinse, repeat.

XTerm still emulates Tektronix storage CRT terminals. Ctrl+middle click on the terminal and select 'Show Tek window'.

Serial terminals enjoyed a small resurgence in the mid-90s when people started installing Linux end discovered that they could have a second screen by finding an old terminal for cheap or free. One summer I had one outside on the patio.

I still like X windows for the fact I can run a GUI application on one machine and get the GUI displayed on another. I find myself using it every so often to get a GUI application on my phone, which is mainly done "because I can", or more practically to run something with a GUI from a remote server, like an image viewer for example.

I started using computers in school while using a TTY with a dial-up line. They had a special sound-proof room (kind of like what they use for music practic) that they put the thing in just to keep from driving people crazy. There was a day when they completely ran out of the rolls of paper, but we were undeterred. I went into the mens washroom and took a roll of hand towels, and we used that in the interim until new supplies arrived.

That's why if you want to do something serious under the hood in Linux, you still reach for the terminal. I'm glad that's built in and no external teletype has to be used.

I remember the era before CRT displays. The first minicomputer I used was a PDP-11 running RSTS with a DECWriter. I also used an Apple II in that era as it had just come out.

When I was in my 4th year of high school I learned the escape sequence to move the cursor around on our video terminals. This was on a HP 2000E timeshare system. I used that to write a game I called Logan, which was similar to Robotron (before Robotron) where bots chased you around a yard and you had to make them run into electric poles. Even running on the primitive video terminals of the day, this became insanely popular and eventually took over all 5 terminals in our lab all day long. The computer instructor decided that couldn't happen and deleted it from the system. Rather than recognizing he had a budding computer game author on his hands he decided he wanted his lab back. Not his best moment.

Was at the national museum last year. Was a blast. Low amount of visitors, super knowledgable staff eager to show running machines and able to explain to not as knowledgable people like me. Unfortunately it is lacking some of recent history. Would deffo recommend. Seems to be a little underfunded though as it doesnt get gov funds. Buy a coffee and a souvinir from the store inside ❤

the mainframe at Caulfield Institute of Technology in 1975 was the ICL 1904A (?) used teletype but had a handful of vacuum tube terminals. I entered programs in BASIC and got an output on a tty or the VDU which didn’t use any paper. The people doing EDP used FORTRAN on cards, there were these big card readers which started with a whine noise.

We had a Teletype machine exactly like that at School in 1980. It had a modem acoustic coupler so it could log into the computer at the local University. We would feed the punch tape back into the machine over and over making copies to produce confettii.

It's funny how X still exists, and I'm still using it. Obviously (I think) I'm using it at the local machine but it's crazy to think how old it is.

A few additional notes (and corrections) on the subject of random access displays (as opposed to raster CRTs): What all these have in common is that you address a random point and activate it. In its most basic implementation, this is "point plotting" display or "X/Y display". This just displays a dot at the coordinates in question, maybe at a selected brightness/intensity. This is also what's found on the PDP-1. Notably, the dots drawn are discontinuous, it's just a dot and the next dot. Everything else, e.g., drawing a line or refreshing what's on the screen, is left to the software in the computer. Otherwise, the dots just fade away (these displays typically feature a slow phosphor to stabilize the image), to be replaced by what's drawn next. (Therefore, these displays are also sometimes called "animated displays" or "painted displays".) Technically, it's an elaborate oscilloscope with a digital input, typically using the kind of CRT that had been developed for RADAR. (Remember the slow phosphor? This is a feature you want to have for both applications., as is a high display resolution.) Most notably, there is no memory or register whatsoever in the display, besides the buffers for the current display coordinates. (Given the quite astronomical costs of core memory for what would required for a screen buffer, as well as the rather slow speed of this memory, we can probably see why this was a typical setup for early computer displays. On the other hand, as resolution wasn't limited by any RAM, these displays had also quite a high resolution, in the case of the PDP-1 1028 x 1028, and there was even an option for a small, high density 4096 x 4096 display with a display area of just 3" x 3". We'll see later, why that should be this small.) The next step is adding some memory and processing power in order to load off the refresh cycle to a dedicated piece of hardware. These were typically cabinet sized, just like the computers they were connected to. Now, you could have also vector commands, while the display hardware was still just drawing dots. Also, this was quite a complex and costly piece of hardware. On the other hand, there were actual vector displays, which provided continuous activation, while the beam swept over the screen, from one location to the next one. So, instead of discrete dots, we get a series of lines connecting these dots. In order to do so, there had to be some memory, as well, where we can store a list of coordinates that should be visited in turn, as the image is redrawn on the screen. This is a true vector display, and it comes a bit later in history (because of memory technology). There were even variants, where a sub-circuitry would add the required modulations for drawing characters at a given display location, providing a much faster way to draw text, than the display would actually allow for. Here, speed translates to the amount of text that can be displayed at once, without the display starting to flicker, as the list of display coordinates to visit in a redraw cycle became too long to keep up with the kind of sustain the phosphor of the CRT could provide. On the downside, these characters were often crude and not that great to read. A limiting factor for all these random access displays was image stability. While the beam of a raster display travels just a minimal amount between two display locations and this in a continuous motion, the beam of a random access display has to address various locations, which may be anywhere on the display area of the screen (as implied by "random access"). Meaning, it may have to travel quite a bit at high speed, which is prone to any kind of overshoot and undershoot as the deflection coils are energized to the required level to address a given location. But, if we want a stable and sharp image, the location illuminated as we refresh the screen should be exactly where we illuminated it the cycle before this. In the case of point plotting display, where we are displaying discrete dots, we can address this by adding some time between moving the beam to a display and activating it to a level, where we excite the phosphor to visual level. Here, in terms of the precision and the resolutions at which we can achieve a stable image, the simple point plotting displays really shine, while also putting a limit to what amount of dots we can put on the screen without too much of a flicker. (This also introduces an additional constraint of display size versus precision and stability. Remember the small high-resolution display of the PDP-1?) With vector displays not so much, as we can't just stop before the next location. Which is also, why there are often blurry edges, especially with the more cost effective variety. Last, but not least, there were also memory display tubes, where the CRT "remembers" where it had been activated and redraws this on its own, without any further input. As this is determined by the phosphor, there is no need to store these locations and its quite precise. But, as in the video, this is a story of its own and this comment is already quite long as it is… Also, thanks for a great video! I always wanted some coffee table book on the subject.

would love a video on the evolution of XServer and how it went from what it was to what it is today and the motivations behind the migration away from it with the caveats that process alone faces possibly due to the longevity of X being so deeply ingrained in all the graphics libraries and applications written to use it - I'm using Linux Mint, which as far as i can tell, still uses XOrg instead of Wayland

EDSAC had bitmap displays in 1949, the SAGE early warning system had displays with light pens (guns) in the mid 50's... Tektronics 1960's... Evans and Sutherland 1970's...

My first full time job was running a computer graphics lab using Vision Control’s Conjure graphics system, it was an Australian system that was so rare and expensive that there is very little information about it on the web. We used it for generating SCODL files to feed to a Matrix film recorder which used a tiny and perfectly flat 4K screen to expose film one pixel at a time and via separate RGB filtered passes so it took about 15 minute to image a single 24 bit colour 4K frame.

The VT100 was the fist display I used in a real (paying) job. And I used it for programming for three years.

Speaking of games on teletype, my dad told me how he used to play lunar lander on a teletype machine and the way it worked just sounded a little painful and very slow.

X11 is the best thing for running programs on a system that is dual-homed on a protected, and local network, where you don't have access to the console. You can ssh into the computer and tunnel the X server back across the network using the X terminal as the console. I do this all the time,a dn saves a great deal of headache.

Remember playing Star Trek on the teletype back in the early 80’s. Height of fun at the time ! Who needs graphics !

You tackled some difficult technologies very well there thank you!

Unix 7 edition refers to typewriters quite a lot. Init in 7th for example “When init first is executed the console typewriter /dev/console. is opened for reading and writing and the shell is invoked immediately. This feature is used to bring up a single-user system. If the shell terminates, init comes up multi-user and the process described below is started. When init comes up multiuser, it invokes a shell, with input taken from the file /etc/rc. This command file performs housekeeping like removing temporary files, mounting file systems, and starting daemons.”

Your video was very fascinating. I worked for Visual Technology from 1980 to 1987. I started as an assembler and ended as a lead technician. What fed Visual's growth was their development hardware emulation of DEC's terminals as well as those of other companies. The Visual V-100, for example, emulated the DEC VT-100 nearly exactly. Going into the setup allowed the user to switch emulation to ADS, or Lear Siegler, if needed as well as set other parameters. They had a complete line of terminals including those made under contract for various companies including Burroughs. These were called SPRs or special production runs. What also set Visual's terminals apart from the others was the quality. They used Key-tronics ergonomic keyboards and also high-quality CRTs. In addition to standard ANSI and ASCII terminals, Visual produced a line of graphics terminals that was both a standard DEC compatible terminal as well as a graphics terminal. Their V-102 with the graphics option, an add-on daughter card that sat on deadly pin headers that could rip one's hands apart, handled the GTCO and DEC Regis graphics. Their V550 line used a special low persistence CRT to allow for high-resolution graphics, and their V-450 and V480 series utilized dual Z-80s with one dedicated to the standard terminal with the other for graphics with the V-480 being the color version. In 1982, Visual purchased Ontel Corporation. Ontel produced "intelligent" terminals that were beyond a regular terminal. Ontel's products were more like small PCs complete with hard disks, Phoenix and Hawk drives, floppy drives, and a multitude of add-on cards. The systems had dedicated slots for the main cards as well as additional slots for the add-on cards such as word-mover-controllers for world processing, special communications cards, such as the SDLC controllers, and many other interesting cards including RAM cards covered with static RAM chips. Shortly after this purchase, Visual entered the personal computer market with their V-1050 CP/M 3.0 (Plus) computer and later their Commuter Computer a transportable IBM compatible. I had a V-1050 (Kicks self for selling it!). It was a great system that came bundled with all kinds of software including Z-80 assembler and C-BASIC. The system had a unique hardware setup with a 6502 for graphics with dedicated 32K or video memory. I still have my Commuter complete with user manuals and that system is still operational today as it was when I first got it. I only wish now that I kept my V-1050. By the end of the 1980s, Visual was a bit worse for the wear and made one more shot at the waning terminal market. Their foray into bit-mapped graphics and X-terminals while successful, was a bit too little and too late. They never had the sales they expected as that market was terminal due to PCs being able to emulate the very terminals they were producing through software instead of hardware. They closed their doors in 1991 or 1992.

I usually say ah that's what that is for in these videos, this one was ANSI.sys. like a 4d light bulb moment.

The IBM world was also a lot more wide than 3270 or SNA; there was also Twinax for the minis (S/36 - S/38 - AS/400 etc). Both 3270 and 5250 terminals were block mode instead of character mode, and they effectively worked like hardware-based HTML forms. You'd send a display list to the terminal with input and output records, and you would get the records back when the user pressed a key that raised an interrupt (i.e. the F keys, submit, etc). Stuff like arrow keys and a lot of line/screen editing was done locally on the terminal.

This was fun. I worked at DEC from 1981-1985, and during that time I worked on the graphics firmware for the DEC Professional 350 and later was one of the designers of what became the VT340 (the original prototype was much more capable, but too expensive to produce). The Tek 4010, 4010A and 4014 were storage tube vector displays. Vectors could be drawn at low intensity and they would fade unless refreshed and at high intensity and they would remain displayed until the screen was cleared without being refreshed. The tube was cleared not by removing power, but by flooding it with a higher intensity beam causing the phosphor to release lots of photons and quickly return to a low energy state. The text cursor and cross-hair locator cursor used the low-intensity so they were not retained. If I recall correctly (and I may not), there was a way to erase individual vectors using a higher intensity beam that would overload just the the phosphor along the vector, resulting in the phosphor returning to the base state after emitting a lot of photons. In the later 1980 and early 1990s, I was working at a company that produced terminal emulation software for PCs (Persoft, SmartTerm, respectively), and for the VT340 emulation product, I wrote a very accurate Tektronix 4010/4014 emulator (the DEC VT240 and VT340 had Tek emulation mode); though it did not end up in the final product, I originally had an "Easter Egg" in the code that would make the screen flash when cleared, had the cursors leave ghosts when left in one place for too long, and a few additional quirks unique to those storage tube terminals. I also wrote the ANSI, ReGIS and SIXEL parsers for the SmartTerm 240 and 340.

Ah man i love the colossus (1943), its my third favourite first computer, right after babbages analytical engine (1837) and zuse z machines (1938, 1940, and 1941)

We used to correct errors on teletype program entry by cutting/splicing the paper tape (if it was an error far up the program) or with the rubout. It was a s*d of a job so we tended to not make many mistakes. Didn't stop me (first program in 1976) from "doing computers" for ever. Still I mean :-P

Man, I love that 40's and 50's music you put into your videos to give them the atmosphere of old & retro. Your videos are a great way of learning what they don't teach you at university when studying computer or electronic engineering these days. I am a big fan of yours!

Awesome work as always retrobytes, I’d love to see a follow on from this going into the development of pc graphics standards, CGA, VGA, SVGA, etc. (I’m sure there’s more). Many thanks

Certainly brought back memories! My first job was using CP/M on a vt100 compatible terminal. I have particular memories of the Rosy tty and writing CAD software to use the the 4014 as a display. Punch cards, paper tape, tty's, 4014's were still in use even in the early 80's so I got to get a taste of it all. Thanks for a great video!

This video is longer than what you normally put out. I have to say though like thoroughly enjoyed it. It's more in-depth than what you normally go. I also enjoyed the original BSG reference.... Keep it up!!!!

William's Kilburn Tube. I was Manchester University in the late 1990s when they rebuilt a Manchester Baby for the 50th anniversary (I wrote a full speed emulation of the Baby for a classic Mac!) and I think it's not really true to say that the William's Kilburn tube wasn't understood as a display at the time, for the very simple reason they wrote an animation program to demonstrate its display capabilities, called Kilburn's Nightmare. Which brings me to the next point, it's not true to say that the CRT was observed by pulling down the metal plate on the memory. Instead, there were at least 4 tubes: one for the program (32 words x 32 bits); one for the accumulator; another for the program counter (yep, a whole tube with just one line) and a final tube, called the monitor, which was simple a CRT that showed a copy of one of the other CRTs, selected by 3 buttons. Which brings me to the last point: on the William Kilburn tube, the brightness of the dot didn't denote 0 or 1, the _length_ of the dot denoted 0 or 1, where a 1 was 3x the length of a 0. All this is described in the SSEM Programmer's Reference Manual: curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/mark1/prog98/ssemref.html Kilburn's Nightmare can be seen on this screenshot describing a Manchester Baby simulator: davidsharp.com/baby/

In the early 60s there was another application that started out using the Tek style terminals called PLATO. This was a computer based education project run out of the University of Illinois. I highly recommend Brian Dear's book The Friendly Orange Glow for a comprehensive history of PLATO and especially the evolution of the display technology. In the late 60s they invented the first plasma screens which also used the pixel wiring grid as the video memory. Really interesting stuff...

Great range of displays. I got another one, plasma was used from 1964. I wish we could've heard the TTY in all its glory as I find it's better to show instead of tell where you can. By the way the typing "look" and having same output over and over triggered my ADHD 😂 Anyways cheers for the video, awesome work as always

Again a great episode! Noteworthy is the SAGE computersystem (AN/FSQ-7) which predates the PDP-1 (by probably a couple of months).. The system had vector display terminals with their vector lists stored in rotating drums within the display stations

Absolutely fascinating, so well done. I loved the SGI references, still regret selling mine. I think X gets more grief than it perhaps deserves, there's something to be said about opening the display of a 30 year old system on your modern system, but then I'm far from your typical use case. 🙂

We had Commodore PET computers at collage in 1981 but we also had a punched card machine. Part of our course involved writing a program on punched cards. Your stack of cards was then sent away for processing. Two weeks later you would get back a printout with the error code showing that your program had failed. Programming on the PET was much more rewarding.

This was very well done and an interesting and not too dry watch. Really enjoyed it.

Senior linux engineer, today I learned what TTY stands for ha.

My introduction to computers was in 69-70. Our math teacher had a teletype terminal installed in his classroom and we could write BASIC programs that we could run on a timeshared mainframe someplace downtown. Great fun. From there to the Computer Science program at Northern Arizona University in 75. More teletypes with paper tape punches. Turn your program in and come back a few hours later to see if it ran. Nope, rinse and repeat. Some assignments required you to create a punch card deck and turn those in. Back to school in 82 and using a VAX for some courses, but back to teletypes and paper tape for COBOL programs running on another time shared computer. The advent of the PC was a giant leap. To be able to code and run your programs in real time was wonderful. Creating programs in BASIC and Turbo Pascal. Coding COBOL programs and running/testing in real time on our local IBM 370. We have come a LONG way

i was expecting this to be about the display hardware like crt like how you explained at the end, but what this was turned out to be even more interesting for the reasons you listed. subscribed!

I somehow wasn't expecting X and Wayland to get brought up here, but I'm glad they were. I've been using Wayland (specifically Sway, a Wayland compositor meant to work like i3wm) on my crappy laptop for years now, and it runs so much smoother than X ever could.

This is incredible stuff. Thank you for taking the time to dive into this history! I've been taking a deep dive into the history of computing for quite a while now and your content definitely scratches that itch. I'm now a new subscriber, and I look forward to checking your content out. You definitely deserve more recognition!

What I'll always remember about Xwindows is the massive set of manuals that documented all the intricacies of it. I used monochrome X terminals in university in the early 90s. They were a big step up over the ASCII terminals they were using until a year or two before that.

Excellent video and pleased to see Xterm get some coverage. 👍😀

My university primarily had Sun SPARC Stations that used XWindows on UNIX. And there was nothing stopping us opening a terminal to an _Ultra_ SPARC station and connecting an XClient back to our local server on the slow SPARC Station over the secure terminal connection. I memorized the IP addresses of all the fastest UltraSPARCs on campus.

It took Walmart up until three years ago to switch from terminal based applications for receiving freight. I used to work on a receiving dock and they were using an android terminal emulator that connected via xterm to the mainframe on site. The program we used would ask for a terminal type and autofilled the field with "vt220". They still use terminal programs to post and research problems with orders. The worst part about it is that the android based programs they use now are worse because they use http requests and are actually 100x slower than an xterm connection, and that delay is on top of all of the "fluff" they added in to make the program look more like a phone application like animations.

16:30 Yep, that was *MY* first computer interface, mid-late 1970's. And yes, I remember just how loud the Teletype machines could be.

As a retired EE thanks for the trip down memory lane. Youngins don't realize how much of a problem memory was in the early days of computers.

Glorified typewriter yes. But man, it transmitted some major world history . Battles were won or lost on it's clackatee clack. Love your videos dude.

The power driven keyboards on teletypes were always interesting to type on. Power assisted keying!

Thanks for making a really interesting video. It's amazing how many throwbacks we have still in computing that potentially predate the computer.

so nicely done! I hope to use this video as a resource (with credit of course) in some of my documentaries! Keep up the great work!

There are many excellent channels on yt but very few are done at the level this one is. Concise and to the point, perfect narration, witty humour and no worn out jokes and KZfaq cliches. I salute you Sir !

I owned a couple of NEC Spinwriter teleprinters as a teenager. I hooked one up to an old Hayes 300 smartmodem and was able to dial in to my local chat BBS. It worked, but you could only chat for as long as you had more tractor feed paper.

This was a surprisingly interesting video, awesome job! Thank you. I really didn't think there was so much to this seemingly simplistic subject that I was completely unaware of. Very enthralling.

The first interactive computer display that i know of is the DSKEY on the Apollo Guidance Computer, the first real time computer.

I had no idea magnetostrictive delay lines were used for video memory. This was a really enjoyable video!

My first computer, an IMSAI 8080, had a front panel with switches and LEDs. It was a better quality clone of the Altair 8800. Back when I started my career in telecom, in 1972, I spent my time as a bench tech, overhauling Teletype machines. A few years later, I moved into computers and worked with delay lines and core memory. In fact, I have a 4K bit core memory plane here, salvaged from a Collins 8500 computer. We had Teletypes connected to the computers, later replaced with glass terminals, including VT100/102. Later again, I worked at IBM, providing 3rd level OS/2 support and one of the products I supported was called "Personal Communications", which was a 3270/5250 emulator that could run on OS/2 or Windows. I know you didn't want to mention SNA, but Personal Communications worked over it too. You mentioned the Adventure game. I first came across it on a VAX 11/780 computer at work. However, it's now included with many Linux distros in the package bsd-games. It can also now be installed in Windows, in the Linux subsystem and I've even installed it on a Chromebook.

The fact that you used Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli's Minor Swing in this video makes it even better. Impeccable music taste.

Thank God you mentioned Wayland at the end 🙏I was almost worried for a hot minute that you wouldnt. Great video!

By the way, the part about graphics terminals reminded me of The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. You may already have read the book, but if you’ve only seen the PBS documentary based on it that only covers about 10% of the book. I love how he complains about his BSD-loving and VMS-loving coworkers fighting with each other about which was better. And there’s a whole segment discussing getting a new graphing terminal and spending days trying new visualisation programs for his physics students’ data, or something like that. It’s really immersive and fun if you’re already accustomed to reading terminal outputs, although he certainly does his best to narrate and describe what some things mean. But if there’s no learning curve, you can jump right in and feel (secondhand) nostalgia. Also if you weren’t familiar with it, part of how they tracked down the hacker was by realising he used ‘ls’ flags which weren’t common in their region, but were in other ones! Something they wouldn’t have noticed if they probably weren’t immersed in those platform supremacy arguments 😆

28:26 DEC’s terminals actually implemented a superset of the ANSI-standard escape sequences. The ones with the question mark after the CSI are DEC-specific ones. They also became part of the _de-facto_ standard.

Thank you for sharing. For some reason as a 45 year old, I am finally digging derp into how computers really work

Yes Peri, that's what PCB stands for - love it!

Real nice video - glad you touched on screen tech. at the end there, and yeah, the focus you chose was very appropriate B)

Well, that was surprisingly interesting and entertaining. I appreciate that you mixed in some humour and comedy without going overboard, at least for my taste. I ook forward to seeing you cover similar topics in the future, if you'd so choose.

I'm giving my age away here, but when I did an internship during highschool I worked on a mini computer via a teletype. When they had nothing for me to do I would load a chess program via tape, put the chess board up and type my moves, the computer would write his moves on the "typewriter". Later studying at university, we were the last year doing our computer science assignments on a mainframe using punch cards. Very frustrating to get the printout with "SYNTAX ERROR LINE 11" after waiting for 20 minutes. Several of the buildings still had "dumb" terminals connected via long cables or phone lines. Then they installed networks using BNC cables and the first generation IBM PC XT and later PC AT. Often you ran a TTY software under MS DOS to log into the mainframe, it was years before graphical user interfaces. But yeah, when you open the terminal under Linux and start hacking cryptic commands, that's what people did in those days. Actually, my university thesis was porting a FORTRAN software for railway simulation from a mainframe to Unix V under X Windows. Thanks, very good video. Good pace, entertaining narrating, good images of the old equipment.

Bletchley was a collection of talent that is legendary... The IQ around there back in the day... WOW!

38:25 This was based on an actual standard called “GKS”. I think the “GSX” name denoted a superset. The problem with GKS was, it was never designed for highly interactive graphics, with things changing on the screen all the time. It was more oriented towards CAD-style applications. You wouldn’t want to use it for games, for example.

Fascinating video. I MUST get to Bletchley Park at some time to have a good look around! Thanks! 👍

This video was beyond great… love this kind of content

The blinkenlights reminded me of when a place I worked for bought a computer business in Germany. The Germans had added a "feature" to their Unix machines, a small computer with an LED display that communicated with a daemon through an RS-232 port. It displayed the status of the machine (memory usage, CPU load, etc.) with various numeric displays and of course colored blinking LEDs. We tried very hard to be polite as they explained what this goofy thing was and how it made their Unix machines the best in the world. When we the new owners of their company told them to get rid of it because it was a waste of money, they were shocked and offended! They had spent thousands of dollars developing this device which gave instant and vital information about the system to anyone who happened to be in the computer room and couldn't be bothered to type a command to get the same information.

4:02 A couple notes regarding the Williams Kilburn tubes without being too pedantic. The 0 was implemented as a dot and the 1 was a dash. In that way they could recover a clock from the signal. That leads to all the little dots present, and some of them "brighter" because there were the ones, like 2 dots together. And you cannot really open the lid to see the dots, because the lack of refresh would immediately kill the memory. So what they did for practical reasons was to simply place a second independent CRT in parallel, without a lid, to actually see the dots.

I was a field service tech for DEC back in the day. I worked everything from current loop teletypes to VT220s and later.

When I arrived at UCLA in 1971 they already had the URSA display system. (The initials were a play on the fact the ursa is Latin for bear and the UCLA mascot was bruin bear while UC Berkeley's was a golden bear.) These terminals were designed at UCLA and built for the UC system under contract. The terminal included 3 major components: - a Bell and Howell black and white TV set - a custom designed keyboard - a box containing the control electronics (about the size of today's tower PCs) These terminals were connected to an IBM 360/91 (the fastest computer in the world when built) through a custom device (designed and built by UCLA). This required custom software on the 360/91 and of course on the terminal controller. Much of pioneering work was done with funds from DARPA to support defense research (as was ARPA net, which had it's 1st node at UCLA). If you had an ARPA net account, you could use the URSA terminal to access ARPA net. The URSA system predated IBM's TSO (Time Sharing Option) that was a commercialy available system. Because of the heavy investment and better efficiency of URSA on the 360/91, UCLA used it long after TSO and IBM 3270 display terminals became less expensive. I wish I could find a picture of the URSA terminal. By today's standard the URSA terminal was the dumbest terminal you could build. The big advantage over existing technology was that the box was totally electronic (although it turned out immense amounts of heat and the cooling fans were very noisy).

Remember my first High School computer project used a paper tape teletype and acoustic coupler to the 'mainframe" at Preston Polytechnic. My first employer used a range of Wyse terminals to display downtime analysis data for production lines....wow the 1980s.

Really enjoyed this, subscribed.

I remember using telex terminals with paper tape readers & writers. We always coiled our tapes in a Figure-8 as it wouldn't jam or rip the tape. And if you typed fast you could type faster than the hole punch could punch. I also remember the audio cassette storage and those were valuable. Eventually i worked for CDP (the first IBM PC clone) and wrote software including SCSI device drivers used by anyone who used really massive hard drives. We were in the ANSI SCSI Standards Committee. Ultimately it became other things including the CAN network used in all modern cars (including the Tesla). As for display technology I tried to get Intel to separate video refresh from their CPU as an effort to speed up CPU processing. Somehow Intel never really understood this and i went elsewhere. Those were the days. We made History.

"However...there's a but. And it's a big but, I cannot lie." I like big buts. Battlestar Galactica?! I remember watching Mormons in Space as a first-run series, though it was only latterly (pun intended) that I came to realize the series arc was a rehash of Joseph's Myths. I thought it was nice they actually credited Tektronics for their terminal displays.

IIRC, the vt100 could not position the cursor on the screen. The text that went to the screen simply advanced line after line. It was only with the vt102, that you could jump around the screen to place the text where you wanted. This is why people were still using line by line editors like ed, with vt100. Only with the vt102 could you emulate something like a full screen text editor. I actually had both a vt100 and a vt102 that I used through the serial ports of an early 90s Linux computer for additional live terminals, years after regular CGA and better displays, and PS2 keyboards and the like we're readily available. So I had the main display and keyboard hooked up to the Linux box, but also the vt100 and vt102 hooked up so that other people could work on it at the same time.

display technology played a big role in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). At Agriculture Canada we first had mini computers hooked up to Tecktronix terminals and X terminals. Then the computation and display all on a personal computer (PC).

"But...and there is a but. I cannot lie." I see what you did there, Sir Mixalot.

Excellent and fairly comprehensive. Only a couple things I think you passed over. (1) Things like the dot matrix DECwriter which were essentially high speed teletypes that got rid of the spinning ball head printing element and replaced it with the dot matrix head. Much quieter and faster. It had the advantage of still allowing a printed record of your session. The other thing is the fascinating evolution of accelerated graphics hardware and the career of Jay Miner. He developed some of the earliest raster acceleration technology for the Atari 800 series of microcomputers. It allowed you to have hardware sprites and you could switch color mapping, graphics modes and memory mapping on each new raster line. This evolved into the first hardware bit blitter (graphics mover) invented by Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics. Jay Miner's next computer, the Amiga, also had a hardware bit blitter as well as all of the goodies created for the Atari 800. This wonderful combination of raster-line remapping, hardware bit blitter and sprites enabled the creation of the Amiga's Workbench GUI operating environment. The Amiga was the first personal computer with all of those features, stereo digital audio and a full multi-tasking OS with standardized graphics libraries -- making it way ahead of its time. Unfortunately Commodore mismanaged that whole thing and we had to wait for Linux to give us an alternative to the lesser PC and Mac environments.

amazing video. I watched it till the end, as with all your videos. didn't know about X using shared memory, I thought they still communicated with the server using sockets, but it makes sense from a performance point of view.

As a purely emotional retro thought, it would be neat to see more people using text based and or monochrome display on Thier modern computers. My fave is green.

I used to repair Teletype ASR 33 and ASR 35. I also trouble shoot PDP-11"s down to the chip level including. the arithmetic unit.

I got to play with a Telex machine back in the early 80s. A very fascinating device especially to a young teenager. These were dependent on telephone lines and per min charges were pricey back then unless you had some kind of phone plan with prepaid time. My dad did get access to a modem that you put a handset into and let me log into a telex BBS with my TI-99 4a once. That was absolute magic to me back then. I remember that I downloaded an image of a Jack-o-lantern to my screen and a few other things. Took several mins to download at around 200 baud. Thus started my fascination with being online. Sadly it wasn't until the late 90s before I owned a true internet connected PC.

I used to sell protocol converters which allowed monitors and printers to be connected to otherwise incompatible hosts. So when we connected the first HP LaserJet to an IBM mini or mainframe, IT Managers were amazed. It was like selling candy to babies!

My early days of computing were on a Commodore 64. For years, "The Monitor" and "A TV, color would be nice" meant the same thing.

Very nice video! A small detail about the Vetrex: it has a nice analog circuit that lets the 6809 processor set up a start x value, start y, end x and end y and then it will draw a smooth lines between the two points all on its own. Compared to most other vector systems that only do point this is an improvement, but the CPU does have to keep feeding lines to the hardware over and over. Some other vector systems have a DMA to do that so the CPU can do other things while the display is refreshed. Some have extra hardware to digitally calculate lines and sometimes even curves.

I used Teletypes in the mid 1970s. These devices were loud and seemed to self-destruct regularly, needing maintenance and adjustments every few weeks. I don't miss them.

MacOS X does have X11 available. At least for 10.0 to 10.10. I've run many Unix Apps which used it on my 2012 macbook air. And on my 2008 MBP. It was even downloadable from Apple. It just wasn't the primary display mode. Also, neither of the unix installs I've been using recently use weyland - both still use X11 primary. I could install it, but the unix VEnv on the chomebook already slows the chromebook down plenty.

I worked on a group of SCO servers that had X-Windows back in the '90's but i was happier with \.

Grandstand on Saturdays had the sportsnews and results on a teletype, boy was it annoying with the clattering.

My first job in the 90's was writing RPG II on an IBM S/36. We had it hooked to some old IBM CRT terminals over TWINAX. The terminals had no speaker, and if they wanted your attention they would sound the clapper (clacker?) And if you fiddle with the line terminator everyone on that line would go offline.

Really interesting. Thanks!

I really like how you showed all the output devices. They appeared not in a vacuum, however, so I'd encourage you to look into that side of things. There's a much more abstract notion of INTERACTIVE COMPUTING. Von Neumann acknowledges its existence in his "preliminary discussion" paper, and he talks about using "slightly modified" teletypes for input/output, as if it was an already well-known pattern, and that's because it was. Douglas T. Ross describes the very-very early days of conscious interactive computing, in his memoires on "personal workstations". There was a ton of back and forth discussions on pro/con of using massive (back then) amounts of memory for frame buffer, which essentially blurred the lines between what the machines saw and what humans saw, both looking at the same location in memory. Licklider's "man machine symbiosis" paper also spends considerable amount of time discussing interactions with computers. CTSS was literally an effort in interactive computing. In a nutshell, the problem is connecting the inner state of a machine (unobservable otherwise) to the mental image a human programmer has when operating on that machine. Looking at display technology without understanding the bigger context is less informative, confusing, even, we see a line of devices but not their raison d'etre. With that external frame of reference in place, suddenly it all starts making sense.

There was one more important step around Windows Vista I think. As video memory got bigger, applications were no longer limited to drawing into the one-and-only frame buffer that represented the screen, they got their own frame buffer and we got rid of draw clipping and flickering. Windows can have shadows, transparency, min-max effects.