Some fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
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All the classic colors of CRTs: amber, white, green, and burn-in.
@mwichary That one twigged some nostalgia: My father worked for Control Data, and some of my earliest clear memories are of him taking me to work, and seeing an animated Snoopy in flying ace gear flying his doghouse across the screen — in ASCII art no less, at first.
Long time ago. <sigh>
(As a bonus, the amber brought to mind my old Hyperion mostly-PC-compatible “portable”, which I still have)
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In my next life, I want to come back as a Nixie tube.
@mwichary My dad had an old electronic calculator — an enormous thing that must have weighed 20 kg — with a row of 10 or 12 Nixies for the display.
It was fascinating to watch in use, because it was *just* slow enough to see the digits flicker back and forth while it was calculating the answer.
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@michaelgemar @mwichary
“infant set up”
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More of the photos I took are here: https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990
@mwichary Thank you! Some beautiful examples. Always love the vibrancy of some of those old machines. And of course some good clunky switches!
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…but I have never seen a screen-less printer-terminal like this one!
Well generally I have seen those tractor feed terminals with keyboards, just not with such striking design and colors.
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…and some very good regular switches, too.
(I liked the whole hierarchy of toggles in that last photo.)
@mwichary oh those are some niiiiiiice switches
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Some fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
@mwichary The terminal on top of the short-stack PDP-11s in the first picture is one of the most perfectly futuristic things I've ever seen. Any chance you remember what it is? [edit: Oop, nevermind, found it. DEC VT05 (or possibly VT8-E)!]
(Also I've never noticed the proofreading-style insert/delete keys before, but I love them)
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Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
@mwichary Postmodernism.
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Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
@mwichary Why? Because they are great for some people. The ball inside is round and it feels right to grab round things. Why do most companies go out of their way to make mice look like this odd shape that is like nothing you touch in normal life?
If today’s UI wasn‘t that hostile to single-button-no-scroll-thingie I‘d be rocking the puck every single day.
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This magnificent Enter on both sides of this Singer/Friden minicomputer console.
@mwichary Long live the vertical Enter! The only correct orientation.
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Some fun photos from Large Scale Systems Museum near Pittsburgh!
@mwichary Lovely thread that badly needs AltText (would serve the fully sighted well, too)
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Some very good on/off switches…
@mwichary We need more on/off switches to be like this.
[edit: me->be]
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More of the photos I took are here: https://flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72177720332956990
@mwichary OMG this thread is spectacular! Thanks for sharing! 🤩
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Why do companies tried to make circular mice happen so hard? I think this is the third one I know of (after the iMac puck one and the later NeXT one).
@mwichary Another one for your list: I used one on a Dec MicroVax II, back in the late '80s. It had quite a large diameter, and fit reasonably well under the hand.
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Speaking of, some more nice keyboards.
@mwichary Can't wait for the next Severance season
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…but I have never seen a screen-less printer-terminal like this one!
@mwichary We had a screen-less printer terminal for our PDP-something in high school (Gymnasium) in the early eighties. IIRR it was able to print symbols for the APL programming language
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