[GreenKeys] Teletype Corp. History circa 1960

[Robert Nickels]

On 3/16/2023 10:11 PM, Jim Haynes wrote:
>
> By the time we got integrated circuits, any small company in a garage
> could build CRT terminals as easily as a big company.

Hi Jim,

Yep, and they did.  Some big names like Hazeltine, Lear Siegler, Data 
General, and DEC took their shot once the game shifted from 
electromechanical expertise to stuffing ICs onto a board,  but also new 
entrants including TeleVideo,  Beehive, CTC (Datapoint), and Courier 
Terminal Systems popped up and brought innovations like the ability to 
emulate multiple protocols or perform off-line editing ("(smart").    I 
worked with an early employee at Courier and when he heard someone was 
cleaning his garage out and had a couple of terminals with MITE printers 
I went for them, but they were so flaky and used proprietary interfaces 
that I didn't even move them when I left that job.

It's probably worth mentioned the TI Silent 700 series in this context, 
as with their quiet thermal printers the were a competitor to Teletype 
for some applications.   They were OK at slow baud rates but when modems 
reached 1200bps TI had to invent a new printhead that would heat up fast 
enough to keep up.  A place I worked used them on microcontroller 
emulators, with cassette tapes for storage.    Since the only means of 
display was to print to paper, the engineers liked them as they could go 
grab a cup of coffee while the thing was chugging out a listing.

I do still have my ADM-3, the iconic dumb terminal by LSI, out in the 
garage, maybe someday I'll see how big a noise that electrolytic will 
make when I power it up for the first time in decades.    Here's what's 
under the hood: 
https://hackaday.io/project/172173/gallery#3d31dbee7e87d92ee128021304357a4b

73, Bob W9RAN