[GreenKeys] "Burroughs" TTY

[Jim Haynes]

I always liked the Honeywell 200, though I never used one.

It was featured in Industrial Design magazine as an example of excellent
design.  In a computer center you are always short of counter top space,
work surfaces.  So Honeywell designed the 200 to be only about 42 inches
tall and made the top of the cabinets a Formica counter top.  As I recall
it was also on legs so you could sweep under it.

Then it was marketed as a serious challenger to IBMs best-selling 1401
computer.  I believe it forced IBM to announce their System/360 before
they were really ready to.

The Honeywell 516 and its successors resulted from Honeywell's acquisition
of minicomputer maker Computer Control Co.

To bring the topic back to green keying, the 1960s were the era of time
shared computing, often using Teletype Model 33 machines as terminals
for the users.  G.E. had early success in this field with a system 
developed at Dartmouth, running on a pair of G.E. machines coupled
through a dual-ported disk drive.  One was the 265, which did the
actual computation, and the other was the Datanet-30 which did the
terminal multiplexing and program editing.  The Datanet-30 was possibly
the best of several computers specialized for communication handling
and starting to put an end to the use of paper tape for storage in
switching centers.  There were also the Collins C-8400 system, which
sold well to the airlines, always a Collins strong point.  And the IBM
7740 and there was a machine marketed by ITT but manufactured by DEC;
and then Univac had a Real Time computer as well.

When the Datanet-30 got long in the tooth G.E. developed a larger
more expensive communication machine, the Datanet 355.  Apparently
this was not what the market demanded.  Dartmouth upgraded their G.E.
computers to the 600 line, but used Honeywell 316 minicomputers for
the terminal handling rather than the expensive Datanet 355.

The Datanet-30 was manufactured in Phoenix, along with G.E.s other
business type computers.  Process control computers were also manufactured
in Phoenix, but by a different organization in the company.  Near the
end of its product life G.E. top management decided the Datanet-30 was
a communication product rather than a computer, and moved its manufacture
and support clear across the continent to Virginia.  About the same time
the organization there produced the Datanet-300 teleprinter terminal,
and later the Datanet-1200 terminal, operating at speeds of 300 wpm and
1200 wpm respectively.