These are called DVST - Direct View Storage Tube devices - or a modified slow persistence phosphor oscilloscope. And yes the clear, function was done by large voltage pulse (blinding flash). They had a very high resolution graphics and were (surprisingly) popular for a long time. Tek invented computer graphics. Tektronix 'Plot 10' plotting package was de rigeur for years and xterm still supports many of the functions. But it was funny how companies believe their own hype. When we developed Magnolia in Tek Labs in 1979, we did a Raster Graphics display and the Terminals Division poop-ed on it, because they were selling so many 4014's at the time. When RamTek did a check raster graphics terminal and almost overnight the market for blinding green flashes went away. There were terminals lined up in hallways in Wilsonville that they could not sell. On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 7:22 AM, Robert Diamond <rob(a)robdiamond.com> wrote:

Don’t know, there was the “brain damaged” Hazeltine mode even in V6. I suspect there were a lot of random things kicking around that got hooked up after the initial model 33 and 37 ttys. I’ve found several early pictures, one of Ritchie, and another of Thompson (though Ritchie is in the background) sitting with what appear to be Tektronix 4014s.

For those who are reading about this as history and didn’t live it this experience this statement needs more background. I will look up the VT05, but hope that you may add some to color as to this stands out. Thanks, Ben

On 22 November 2017 at 11:42, Ben Greenfield via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: In short: the VT05 was DEC's first video terminal, from the early '70s, and would have presumably been in use at some installations that used early Unix. My guess - and this is entirely a guess - is that it had been entirely supplanted by the VT52 and friends by the time Unix gained widespread popularity. There is a pretty good overview of the VT05 at https://vt100.net/dec/vt05.html and http://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT05 has a plethora of pictures. I have no idea why there are no termcap/terminfo entries for the VT05. stty in BSD as early as 2.79 understands "vt05" as a settings argument, but it's not clear to me what you would use for $TERM. -Henry

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 4:55 AM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: The VT05 needed a delay added on CR as it was slow to scroll the screen buffer, so every logon would have required: stty cr3 I amused to see that stty cr3 still works on Linux but on my desktop there is no visible effect on scrolling speed. I suspect the VT05 was not popular as it was slow, uppercase only, 72 characters x 20 lines, and not cursor addressable (much like Teletypes of that time). I also think the VT05 never sold in significant numbers, certainly to this day there are only a small number in the hands of collectors (despite being much sought after). This caught my eye: "It is completely portable, weighing only 55 pounds...". The VT05 is a beast, it is so deep (Depth 76cm / 30 inches) and heavy, although one person could lift it, the size and shape really make it a two person lift. In searching for images on the Internet I'm not finding as many images of DEC PDP-11 installations from the 1970s as I hoped, mostly the usual DEC marketing photos. This suggests a todo item is to compile photos of early Unix installations sequenced in time. At my local university I recall the early CRT terminals connected to Unix systems were: GTC GT-101, ADM 3a, VT100 [1] and Tek 40xx. The first CRT as output displays (these arrived before the terminals) were Matrox graphics card connected monitors. [1] The DEC VT100 was rare as it was expensive at the time and the usual reason anyone had one was it shipped as the console bundled with a PDP-11.

On 23/11/17, Nigel Williams wrote: I wrote a VT05 emulator some while ago: https://github.com/aap/vt05 It's certainly not perfect and probably has some bugs, but I somehow had the urge to write it for no particular reason. I would actually be interested in the newline delay the machine needs because I didn't implement it. I hope this doesn't derail the discussion too much, but I would actually like to know which teletypes were used at bell labs. What strikes me as odd is that in UNIX lower case is the norm yet the ASR-33, which I would assume was ubiquitous, does only to upper case and also doesn't do some characters used by C, like {}. In this famous photo you see ASR-33s...so were they really the main interface to early UNIX? https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/kd14.jpg aap

My guess is the tty culture on UNIX revolved around the Model 37. This had upper and lower case as well as having the concept of NEWLINE as both the shoot the paper up and move the type element back to the left side. It ceratainly is ingrained into nroff, all those ESC-8/ESC-9 stuff that nroff puts out are direct commands to the Model 37. I suspect that it was just the case that most PDP consoles were Model 33’s. They were cheaper and pretty ubiquitous. Even when I started with UNIX in 1977, most of our machines had Model 33 consoles even if they had CRTs or fancier printing terminals (LA36 or Model 37’s).

Ah, the Sinus 700. I had forgotten about those .

Some thoughts... In the late 60s, early 70s the number glass tty's being made were actually fairly small at first. They tended to be custom build for specific uses, such as the airlines or wall street traders. The idea of the glass tty was not quite ready to be birthed. Mostly because the cost was high and the need was not quite yet there. IIRC VT05 and the like cost multiple thousands of dollars in late 1960/early 1970s money [FYI - the dollartimes.com website says that's between $13K-$15K in todays money]. Remember that at the time the of the VT05, its follow on the VT52 and its contemporary, the logic was built primarily with using MSI TTL; including all the video logic to drive the display itself. A dominate cost of the terminal was the static ram chips. A single 24x80 lines of 2000 chars was $50-100 in OEM quantities. The keyboard cost about the same. The video sub systems were black and white TV monitors. You still need a case, keyboard and the rest of the logic. The $999 cost of the Lear Siegler Kit that you assembled yourself was a steal. DEC used an Intel 8080 in the VT-100 a few years later, they paid approx a huge amount of money for it, but they were able to make the logic board so much smaller. IIRC the original price for the VT-100 was $3500 in 1976 (they did sell a ton of the them). Shortly thereafter, most terminals had 8080's, 6502s, or Z80s in them. Motorola built the first video chips and it's interesting, how many of the terminals all used same video chips but the processors were more varied. With the prices settling around $700-$1.5K mark by the early 1980s.