[GreenKeys] [External] Re: Was: TWX/TELEX now: Analog Computers

[Jones, Douglas W]

>Who could have imagined flat screens (or even touch screens) back then.

When I arrived at the University of Illinois in 1973, there were perhaps 100 Magnavox flat-screen PLATO IV computer terminals on campus.  They were monochrome, but each and every one of them had a touch screen.  The terminal resolution was 512x512 pixels, and the touch screen resolution was 16x16 -- not very good, but good enough for lots of things.  They used plasma discharge technology, so monochrome means neon orange and black.  All of us who interacted with those things knew that that was just the leading edge of the technology, and we all expected flat screens to come down in price and eventually displace all those big clunky CRT displays.

Those flat screen displays were the product of small-scale mass production in 1973.  The engineering prototypes that offered proof of concept happened around the time StarTrek was in production.

Even before I arrived at Illinois, I had used a computer with a mouse.  That was at Bell Labs in the summer of '73, where the acoustics research department had made several in their machine shop that they used to equip three of the workstations on their local area network (a network also made with homebrew technology).

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu