What's Inside a Terminal? A Comparison of Architectures | VCFMW 18 (2023)
Channel: VCF Midwest
Date: 2023-09-18

Terminals were the main user interface for interactive computing throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. Eventually the personal computer or workstation displaced the terminal as the 'face' of the computers we use. What's inside a terminal and how does it work? In this talk, Richard Thomson takes a look at the internal architecture of several different CRT terminals: the Beehive B100, the DEC VT100 and the HP 2648A. We look at how these terminals are different as well as their similarities, and ask the question 'How does a terminal differ from a microcomputer?' and provide some reasonable answers.
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