[GreenKeys] Anyone remember the VT-05?

[Jim Haynes]

There's an interesting book "Datapoint : The Lost Story of the Texans Who
Invented the Personal Computer Revolution" by Lamont Wood.  Their first
product was a CRT terminal model 3300, and some suggest that model
number means it is 100 times as good as a Teletype Model 33.  Tells
how they had a booth at a computer show, and were not getting much
traffic.  So they went around to the booths of other exhibitors who
were using Teletype 33s in some capacity and got them to let them plug
in the plug-compatible 3300.  Suddenly they had lots of booth traffic
from people who had seen their product in use at the other booths.

A little later one of their star engineers was the late Vic Poor,
previously of Frederick Electronics Corp. and designer of a lot of
the Frederick TTY gear, such as modems and radio receivers and
other accessories.  In the mid 1960s I used to correspond a lot with
Vic and Irv Hoff, who were working along parallel lines to develop
equipment for the ham audience and the commercial/government audience.

Datapoint was located in San Antonio.  Apparently the big city of
San Antonio, once home to a world's fair, was obscure to the high-tech
community.  They got questions like "Where in California is San
Antonio?" and "Does San Antonio have an airport?"  The founders were
ex aerospace engineers who felt there was nothing interesting going to
happen after the Apollo program ended.  Their source of funding required
them to locate and remain in San Antonio.

Vic Poor is generally regarded as the architect of the Intel 8008
microcomputer.  But it wasn't used in their product because Intel wasn't
sure they wanted to make them.  A relationship with Texas Instruments
also fell through.  Their product was built with more ordinary integrated
circuits.  Although it was designed as a terminal, the microprocessor
was accessible to the customer to program, and thus to have applications
run on it.  That's why the author of the book considers Datapoint the
cause of the personal computer revolution.

Although the company is long gone, the name lives on in San Antonio
in the Datapoint Taqueria, which once had a restaurant on Datapoint
Drive.
 	---

 	"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
 	"No it ain't! No it ain't!  But ya gotta know the territory."
 		Meredith Willson, The Music Man