"party line" for terminals?

[Richard]

In article <010601c647a1$1455ec80$6800a8c0 at BILLING>,
    "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org>  writes:

> >> What is the "party line" port and what's it used for?  A search of the
> >> cctalk archives didn't yield anything.
> 
> The HP264x terminals had something vaguely similar. You could daisychain 
> terminals off eachother in a bus configuration instead of the typical star 
> configuration (all RS232). MultiDrop I think they called it.

>From looking at the 264x documentation, I got the impression that this
was a cheap form of networking multiple terminals to a single host.
This makes sense for a 264x since they all have their own keyboards.

For this Westinghouse unit, I'll have to open it up and see what the
circuitry contains, that should give me some idea of how to feed it
data.
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