[GreenKeys] The last days of the serial terminal

[hwhall at compuserve.com]

One of my first jobs out of college while awaiting USAF orders was for P&G, starting up & beginning production at a Pringles plant. Systems were semi-automated with UV erasable EPROM programmed process controllers. We used Datapoint dual-cassette computers to write & modify the programs & run the EPROM programming. An interesting time with fast developments in personal & kit computers.

WayneWB4OGM

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Haynes <jhhaynes at earthlink.net>
To: Eric Moore <mooreericnyc at gmail.com>
Cc: Greenkeys <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Sat, Jan 23, 2021 4:38 pm
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] The last days of the serial terminal

Thanks for the article.

There were plain text CRT video terminals, and also some with graphics
capabilities.  I think this was something that came out of Bell Labs -
Teletype made the terminal, but Bell Labs still thinking of time shared
computing when we were on the threshold of personal computers.

One of the early CRT terminal makers was Datapoint, in San Antonio.
There is an interesting book about the company.  "Datapoint: the lost 
story of the Texans who invented the personal computer revolution" by
Lamont Wood.  A couple of aerospace engineers looking for something to
do after Apollo started the company.  They went to San Antonio because
that's where they found money for their enterprise.  The book notes
people asking them "Where in California is San Antonio?"  or "Does
San Antonio have an airport?"  So it is with the generation of
geograhically illiterate business people.

Their first product was model 3300, which the author suggests was chosen
because the terminal was 100 times as good as a Model 33 Teletype.  It
was plug-compatible with Model 33.  They had a booth at a computer show
and were getting very little traffic.  So they went around to other
exhibitors who were using Model 33 machines to demonstrate their products,
and offered to replace them with 3300s.  Suddenly they had everybody's
attention.

Later Vic Poor joined the company.  Vic had been with Frederick 
Electronics in Maryland, a company that manufactured all kinds of
TTY gadgets: radio receivers and FSK demodulators and code converters,
even a Morse-to-Teletype converter.  I never met Vic in person, but
corresponded with him during the period he was at Frederick and was
working on their RTTY equipment with some interaction with Irv Hoff
working on the ST-6 and Keith Petersen.  I guess Vic left Frederick
about the time the company was bought by Plantronics.

Vic designed their next-generation terminal, which was really a 
programmable computer.  The architecture was basically that of the
Intel 8008; but Intel wasn't ready to make the microprocessor so
Datapoint built it out of smaller scale TTL chips.  They also talked
to Texas Instruments about making the microprocessor and that didn't
fly either.

I guess the original idea for making the terminal programmable was just
so it could easily be adapted to whatever customer requirements came
along.  But it was programmable by the customers, who started using
them like PCs to do some of their business processing.  The book mentions
a company in Minnesota which had an operation in Arkansas and tried
to have the latter do their data processing over a wire from the company's
mainframe in MN.  They had a lot of trouble getting a satisfactory
connection.  Meanwhile the people in AR programmed the terminal to do
their work locally, bypassing the mainframe and wire connection.

There is an oral history interview with Vic Poor somewhere out on the 
web.

An interesting later development was that T.I. attempted to claim
proprietary rights to the microprocessor that Vic had proposed.  Someone
in Datapoint management had earlier decided that the company should have
a distinctive type font, so they had custom type balls made for their
Selectric typewriters.  During the dispute over the microprocessor
architecture Datapoint was able to show that all the documentation had
been produced using Datapoint typewriters and hence T.I. had no rights
to it.  And eventually Intel decided to go ahead with the 8008 micro
processor.

Eventually Datapoint grew to the point where they had to hire professional
management from outside the company.  And this led to some tricky
business such as booking orders they had not yet received to make the
financial figures look good.  Which along with some other factors caused
the company to go under.  But in San Antonio the company name lives
on in the Datapoint Taqueria restaurants, which was originally located
on Datapoint Drive.  Datapoint veteran David Monroe in San Antonio
founded a technology museum in that city, google for SAMSAT.

Vic Poor retired to Florida.  I almost met him once when I was in San
Antonio and he happened to be there visiting his daughter, but we just
couldn't get together.  And shortly afterward he died of cancer.

Jim W6JVE


     ---

     "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
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