Magnavox Plasma display from 1978! Great name, really impressive, and probably very expensive… and yet still with a very thick bezel taking half of the responsibility of making it look awesome.pic.twitter.com/j0mvacI8y0
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TI Insight Series 10 was introduced in 1981. It had 40×24 characters, on a 5½" “swivel” CRT screen.pic.twitter.com/KZsmPGuadL
The IBM 1015 Inquiry Display terminal was relatively similar spec-wise – a 5½" display of 40×30 characters – but much, much older. The screen still looked like a radar tube, betraying its origins. “Erasure time is 6 seconds.” (Be still, my heart.)pic.twitter.com/au8lX99xrb
Up until a point, there were so few characters in displays, that you could just brag about the number. This red Burroughs “SELF-SCAN” display is a “256-character display” (today, we would call it 32×8 instead).pic.twitter.com/7zyT6natx8
(At some point many years later, I saw a mention of a 1920-character display. I bet you can figure out what common text resolution this meant.)
Or this Owens-Illinois terminal (on the right) made things even more complicated. It was advertised as a “64×256 lines at 33.3 lines per inch” – but it’s 40×6 characters, it seems.pic.twitter.com/f6d2LBJkjV
I feel the Osborne 1, Commodore SX 64, and IBM 5100 – all early portable machines with 5-inch displays – are relatively well-known, but should be included anyway.pic.twitter.com/IVWUzioFsJ
A budget mid-1970s IMSAI computer had all the components you’d recognize from early microcomputers… but in very, very different proportions. As far as I understand, this screen could still display 40×24, or even 80×24 characters? (They’d just be incredibly tiny.)pic.twitter.com/JLjGCxI2sq
Berthold Fototype TPE 6001 had a gorgeous screen (*) and kind of an amazing keyboard. Sometimes the most wonderful computers were hidden in specialized areas. Here: phototypesetting. (*) at least on the outside, of coursepic.twitter.com/KKsu86wixz
Up to 10 lines! Up to 198 characters! The smallest Bunker Ramo financial terminals were so small QWERTY just walked away from the whole deal.pic.twitter.com/WMAZPoSAOd
(Although some more fancy ones came with two screens for some reason?)pic.twitter.com/0CdkgPib3X
This SCM Cogito 240 calculator had a 64-digit display. There were many more like it, but this one had – once more – a beautiful big bezel tricking you into seeing a much bigger display.pic.twitter.com/rxHN65nfQk
Some computers couldn’t decide whether they want to pretend the screen is bigger, or just own the small size. Either way, this Culler-Fried System from 1960s had a fantastic keyboard-to-screen ratio.pic.twitter.com/mVtPvhKvBu
Digisplay, a 1972 “flat-screen image sandwich” had 512 *tiny* characters.pic.twitter.com/Qb7kmUQCqD
On the other hand – IBM 4700 financial system had a 5" display, but also a courtesy to come with a smaller keyboard to match it.pic.twitter.com/iEQkENKC7A
We’re getting smaller and smaller still. Philips PX1000/Text Lite PX1200 were portable terminals with just one line of text, and of course it makes sense! They’re so thin and tiny.pic.twitter.com/RYFrHkK7iP
But if there’s one lesson we already learned in tech is that everything comes back: once-solved problems reappear as a headache for the next generation.
And so, a few decades earlier, you could buy a really expensive CompuWriter typesetting machine – but that big space in front was for paper you were typing *from*. The display was a tiny sliver of one line, off to the side.pic.twitter.com/yuk6r0Rdsl
Or, remember that Xerox 850/860 machine from that we started with? If you couldn’t afford even the half-page screen, there was another option: a little display of 16 green letters.pic.twitter.com/nhS5LrBwe6
A Berthold typesetting machine came with a beautiful and unique keyboard – and in the periphery, a “screen” that felt more like a calculator display, with room for only *eight* last characters you typed.pic.twitter.com/hLy1ZSCxOz
And if you’re thinking “at least the calculators are safe,” here is the abominable Royal Digital 3 with only *four* digits and a special key to scroll to the left or right.pic.twitter.com/MPj0pOijEr
(I wrote about Royal Digital 3 in my newsletter last year. It not only has the worst display, but also a pretty awful “keyboard”: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/the-worst-keyboard-ever-made-148939 …)
But at last there *was* a display. Because we’re going to end one of the first computers ever, the otherwise glorious and memorable 1951’s UNIVAC, size of a room, its memory banks filled with mercury.pic.twitter.com/q8kHvTH2K4
There it is, in the middle of its blinking console, surrounded by a white frame – a “display” of sorts, a screen of an era where cathode ray tubes in computers were used for… memory, rather than display. (Yes!)pic.twitter.com/O2XMaMkoXV
It’s pretty simple. Each character UNIVAC can share with you is accompanied by a simple lightbulb that would shine at the right moment.
If it seems simplistic and inadequate, it was, even in 1951.
Luckily at that time, and for a few decades later, people using computers who didn’t want to look at lightbulbs or spend a lot of $ for a flickering screen, had an alternative. At that time, and for a few decades later, the best computer display was still a nearby typewriter.pic.twitter.com/bAblFDLXv7
In conclusion, if you’re interested in the history of displays, BUY MY BOOK ABOUT KEYBOARDS. But seriously, I found all of these in my research of keyboards, so I thought it’d be fun to share this parallel track!
(It’s actually a bit sad how much of this relatively recent history is already gone – how many of those specialized computers survive today only in bad scans of old newspaper photos.)
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