[HN Gopher] A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
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A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
Author : ibobev
Score : 134 points
Date : 2025-12-01 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justanotherelectronicsblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (justanotherelectronicsblog.com)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| The printers for these used a special vacuum tube _for memory_
| derived from the kind in television cameras.
|
| They were massive and printed a whole page at a time, similar to
| the thermal page printers from Perkin-Elmer for their model 3600
| Intelligent Terminal of the early 1980's, but P-E printers were
| much smaller by then.
|
| 3600 had vector graphics too, these were very expensive but
| introduced the form factor of a horizontal box with two 5 1/4
| floppies, monitor on top and wired keyboard with the first row of
| "F" function keys people had seen. Which is the desktop form that
| was later adopted by IBM when they issued their first PC.
| perihelions wrote:
| > _" special vacuum tube for memory derived from the kind in
| television cameras"_
|
| A Williams Tube?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
| adrian_b wrote:
| Not a Williams tube, but similar in principle.
|
| On a CRT with storage for oscilloscopes or computer monitors,
| you looked at the stored image, which is why they were called
| " _Direct-view_ bistable storage tubes ".
|
| On the Williams tubes, the processor read back the data
| stored in the tube, i.e. the stored image was used by the
| CPU, not by humans, so Williams tubes had no need to contain
| fluorescent screens. On a viewing tube, there was usually no
| need to implement a read back method, but only means for
| writing and erasing.
|
| Both the Williams tubes and the direct-view storage tubes
| were derived from the iconoscope tubes used before WWII in
| the early television cameras, according to a proposal made in
| the famous von Neumann report. In iconoscope tubes,
| illumination caused by an external image projected on the
| tube face created an electric charge distribution inside the
| tube, which was read electronically, generating thus a video
| signal, so it was the inverse of a direct-view tube, where an
| electric charge distribution is written inside the tube,
| where it controls the fluorescence of the screen, creating an
| image that can be viewed outside. Both iconoscope tubes and
| direct-view storage tubes differ from simple CRTs by having
| inside an insulating or semiconducting surface on which a
| distribution of electric charge can be stored.
|
| The Williams tubes were a form of DRAM. An even earlier kind
| of DRAM had been used in the Atanasoff-Berry computer, where
| it was implemented with discrete capacitors and John
| Atanasoff had been the first who proposed to make a computer
| memory based on storing electric charge and refreshing it
| periodically, to prevent discharging.
| detourdog wrote:
| I have an artifact that looks like 2 Williams tube fused
| together at the ends. No idea what it is.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I am obsessed with Vector computing and I recently became the
| lucky owner of a Vectrex.
|
| Projects like the VecFever, and PiTrex, exist to make it possible
| to combine vector displays with much more modern CPU technology,
| allowing emulating even old Vector arcade titles like Star Wars
| or Battlezone.
|
| It is criminal that Vector Computing never took off past the
| 1980s, and has died. Nothing, not even OLEDs (sorry Vectrex-Mini
| guys!) can replicate the beauty of phosphor glow.
|
| Speaking of amazing forgotten lighting effects, the techniques
| for the cool lighting effects used in Don Bluth films (and his
| games like Dragons Lair) are also forgotten/unused and I find
| them analogous to vector displays.
|
| I find the death of Vector Displays and the cool display tech Don
| Bluth did to be great examples of "Worse is Better" and
| counterexamples to the idea that progress overtime inevitably
| makes things better.
|
| I wanted a TechTronix vector computer super bad, and still do,
| especially the one's with the fast 3D and color add-ons.
|
| I'll drop a few motivating videos:
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M98VOoGFLL8 (TekTronix
| 3D/Color stuff)
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM
|
| 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j60DV0Ujp_E
|
| 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAPHGBM2sQ8
|
| 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUB6OYeCKek
| megiddo wrote:
| Get Scramble and let me know if you can beat it. At a young
| age, that game destroyed any interest I had in video games. I
| played Scramble for hours, always dying at the same point over
| and over.
| Y_Y wrote:
| You may enjoy bitluni's homemade laser vector tube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdo3djJrw9o
| underlipton wrote:
| barney being the only one whose name isn't capitalized is a low
| blow.
| rbanffy wrote:
| An incredible machine. I didn't remember this one had a dot-
| matrix font - later ones had a vector-based one. I'd love to see
| the definitions for this latter screen font.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Check out HP plotter fonts from the 1980's.
|
| You should have seen the digitizing tables 4 feet square, and
| the oversized plotters that were surplus from oil companies
| after the oil price crash at the end of 1981.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Love Tektronix vector computers. xterm can run Tek vector
| commands (search for "Tektronix xterm" such as the last time it
| came up on here) and I think a few demos are even included in
| some distros.
|
| kitty doesn't have Tektronix vector support right? Would be cool
| if they would consider adding.
|
| But something interesting happened recently which is that it is
| now apparently a given that terminal programs support raster
| graphics. At least, the people at r/command line were treating it
| as such when someone recently posted a program that requires
| something like kitty graphics protocol to work at all.
|
| The kitty raster protocol is somewhat efficient. It could be
| interesting to combine that with some ideas for low latency
| lightweight computing and social networking.
|
| The simplest version of that might be just to have a group of
| people start setting up some type of BBSs over ssh, but designed
| to upgrade the graphics just slightly over ANSI, or even perhaps
| combined with ANSI. People could use emulated vector monochrome
| graphics for some screens if they wanted that Tek vibe.
|
| Another step up possibly would be to make a few STUN/TURN servers
| or some setup so people on IPV6 could find and each other even if
| at home and if IPV4 still connect with whatever NAT traversal or
| maybe there can be such as thing as ssh over WebRTC? That might
| not make sense.
|
| You could also make it content centric and set up something to
| easily do RSS over IPFS (I assume that exists) with a group that
| has agreed they will target ANSI plus kitty graphics with some
| set document size limits to keep things fast and lightweight.
|
| Because kitty graphics are based on escape codes, you might also
| use such a social network for distributing lightweight (binary
| size limited) web assembly applications and games that are
| designed to run in a terminal supporting that. Because web
| assembly runtime support for text output is good I believe.
|
| I do think that there should be some built in load latency or
| data size limit tested and enforced somehow to ensure that you
| keep the snappiness possible with text interfaces.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > But can it run DOOM?
|
| >No[t yet...]
|
| I believe in the community making this a yes.
| riktw wrote:
| I'd love to see that, but for this model that might be too much
| to ask. The 4054 had some options to accelerate drawings, and
| that might be able to pull it off! This video (timestamped)
| shows off some cool grahpic tricks it can do:
| https://youtu.be/M98VOoGFLL8?si=NRwLTqXqObvePrPk&t=190
| OldSchool wrote:
| this is a really excellent demo thanks! Watching, I still
| have to remind myself that the persistence is from the screen
| itself, not being refreshed transparently!
| thih9 wrote:
| If you can render a frame then it runs - the rest is just
| optimizing FPS.
|
| > within the culture of DROE, simply getting Doom displayed
| on the screen of a novel device has been sufficient to
| consider the game played on that technology
|
| Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SFm1dS6myqq7psBKt
| tP7CVYN... "1-Bit Pixels Encoded in E. Coli for the Display
| of Interactive Digital Media"
| pnw wrote:
| One of my first jobs I worked in a government agency that still
| had Tektronix 4054 series used for capturing paper street maps
| point by point into a GIS via a large digitizer and puck that sat
| next to the system. These models had the dynamic graphics option
| 30 module which gives you both the static vector display (that
| required you to clear the entire screen), and a dynamic vector
| display which could be updated in real time for text entry etc.
| The Option 30 worked by driving the screen at a lower current and
| refreshing just those vectors constantly. Given the low res pixel
| displays of that era, even these dated displays were a great
| solution for that task, because the resolution was extremely
| high.
|
| I remember being skeptical that all that electronic map data
| would be very useful to anyone outside the agency without all of
| the required hardware. How little I knew!
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh man, the first graphics code I ever wrote used Tektronix
| vector commands for drawing. It used ASCII escape sequences to
| specify diagonal lines on the screen, but, as I recall you could
| also tell it that instead of drawing a diagonal line, you could
| have it draw a rectangle with what would have been the endpoints
| of the diagonal line being opposite corners of the rectangle.
| These codes were supported by some VT-series graphics terminals
| as well as at least one dial-up terminal program on the PC back
| in the 80s so that's what I targeted on my code (which was a DVI
| previewer for TeX running under VM/CMS).
|
| The original Tektronix terminals (I only ever saw one once) did
| all screen drawing with these vector commands (think the look of
| the classic Asteroids game which I think may have used a similar
| hardware interface to the CRT display), which naturally was not
| especially fast for ordinary text which is why hybrids like the
| abovementioned VT-series terminal (I think it was the 240/340/440
| that had this) ended up supplanting the Tektronix displays.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| LSI ADM 5 terminals also had a vector graphics option (not sure
| if it was ever available for the ADM 3[a] nor if it was
| compatible with Tektronix graphics)
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I owned an ADM3a and used it often back in the days of 300
| and 1200 baud modems. My recollection is that it was just a
| dumb TTY.
| fao_ wrote:
| You can switch a normal xterm to Tektronix mode and do the same
| commands today!
| jacquesm wrote:
| The engineering on anything made by Tek is nothing short of
| amazing. I've a really old 'regular' scope (ok, what's really,
| old, by Tek standards it is still young) and a much smaller and
| lighter (and a bit less deep) digital one, an anemic TDS 210 that
| is more than good enough for any of my needs these days. But if
| you ever have the opportunity to have a close look at one of
| those scope racks on trolleys be prepared to be amazed,
| especially when you learn when it was made.
| riktw wrote:
| Author here, if someone has specific questions, or ideas on
| programs to run on this, do let me know!
| msarnoff wrote:
| Storage tubes are amazing. I once had a Tektronix 464 scope.
| Unlike the ubiquitous 465, the 464 was an _analog_ storage
| oscilloscope! The persistence of the storage tube let you capture
| pulses, visualize signal jitter, etc. And there was a very
| satisfying erase button that cleared the tube with the
| characteristic green flash.
|
| You could also just mess with the horizontal/vertical position
| knobs and use it as a very expensive Etch-a-Sketch.
| pragma_x wrote:
| It's been a while, so I went to Wikipedia for a refresher.
| These things really are amazing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_tube#Storage
|
| Unlike a television CRT, the storage tube will "remember"
| everywhere the electron beam struck the screen as long as the
| voltage is below the erase threshold.
|
| What's wild is that this information can be read back out of
| the device. So, it's not just a display but also memory. It's a
| destructive reading process (not unlike core memory) where
| detection is also erasure, but it really is RAM... of a sort.
| fastaguy88 wrote:
| Before Postscript, tektronix 4010 was the language of graphics,
| at least for biologists drawing phylogenetic trees or
| reassociation curves. The phylip phylogenetics package,
| introduced around 1980, still has the option to generate trees in
| tek4010 format.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| GPIB! Also known as IEEE 488, it was the USB of the 70s.
| howToTestFE wrote:
| This sort of older tech always amazes me. Also how insanely
| expensive ("or around $30.000 in 2025 money") it cost
| fragmede wrote:
| Same even with the launch price of the original Apple computer.
| iirc some $4,000. Helps justify buying as much computer as you
| can afford for side projects/home research.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| What applications and workflows were these workstations typically
| used for?
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| My main used of the Tektronix terminal was to preview _troff_ [0]
| output before sending the final product to the
| phototypesetter[1], which cost a nominal fee per page as I
| recall.
|
| [0] Unix program to format high quality printed documents,
| similar to newspaper/magazine/book printing
|
| [1]machine using photographic paper to output typeset pages,
| supporting a variety of fonts
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