My big project this year is to get a DEC 340 monitor working. Here is a picture of one of them.
The DEC 340 was a very early and rare computer monitor dating from the mid ’60s used of course, on DEC computers, their PDP series. Two cabinets of rack mounted electronics. The 340 is historic and was used in some early work that pioneered modern computer graphic techniques. It is quite a bit different from Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors used by personal computers we were all familiar with a few years ago. In comparison it is alien technology. All circuits are implemented using discrete components and there are no integrated circuits anywhere in the design. The discrete components themselves are unusual dating from the early days of transistor use.
It always amazes me how fast technology has developed over the past few decades.
What I found most interesting about this article is that I actually saw one of these monitors (only the CRT with some accompanying circuits) at a flea-market in Mt. Dora, FL this weekend. I did not know about this monitor, at the time, and I wondered who had made a “round TV”. I thought maybe it had been a variant of those Williams tube memory.
Neat piece of computer history.
Just be wary of sharing Linux and Windows on the same disk. I was doing this for a while with CentOS 7 and Windows 10, only for almost every Windows update (not just the big creators-style ones, but minor ones too!) would overwrite the MBR and force booting to WIndows only!
After about 4th time this happened (by then, I had an emergency live CentOS 7 USB stick to repair the MBR), I bought a (slower) SSD and cloned Windows 10 onto it. Ever since then, not even Windows 1803 has wrecked the MBR. Microsoft are *terrible* when it comes to sharing a disk with another OS!
“It always amazes me how fast technology has developed over the past few decades.” – in this case, we’re talking the 1960s, so it’s been more than just a “few decades”
.
Here is an emulation of what these vector displays could do :
http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/