atex system in Houston

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 3/14/19 1:51 PM, Rick Bensene via cctalk wrote:
> In an earlier posting, I stated that the 4014 (with its 19" DVST tube)
> was the largest DVST display that Tektronix made, to which
> Paul K. responded:
> 
>> An article about those terminals also turns up the 4016 (25 inch tube
> -- 4014 is 19 inches).  I'm not sure any more which of the two it
>> was.
> 
> I stand corrected.
> 
> I never saw one of these during the 13 years (1977-1990) that I worked
> at Tektronix.   But, after looking around online, indeed, they exist,
> and there are a number of them still around, including a beautiful,
> working example at the local Tektronix museum, VintageTek.org.  This is
> probably the article that Paul referred to:
> 
> https://vintagetek.org/dvst-graphic-terminals/
> 
> Funny, last time I was at the museum (which was probably two+ years
> ago), I didn't see it...perhaps it's a newer acquisition.  Had I seen
> it, I would have been surprised, since it was always my impression that
> the 19" tube was the largest.
> 
> The 25" tube had to have some pretty crazy geometry correction circuitry
> in the deflection system to correct for the curvature of the tube face
> in X and Y dimensions, as well as probably some beam power correction to
> account for the curvature.   A pretty amazing accomplishment, for sure.
> Tektronix had some really amazing CRT engineering folks, as well as
> fabulous CRT fab facilities back in the day.
> 
> Thank you, Paul,  for pointing out my error.  Definitely an example of
> learning something new every day :-)
> 

Personally, I think it would be really neat if some of these
computer museums could collect complete end-product systems
and make them run.  Can you imagine showing a bunch of students
how a newspaper was produced using a PDP-11 and one of these
Tek terminals feeding a real printing press.

bill