(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.)
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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(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 …)
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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
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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
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It’s pretty simple. Each character UNIVAC can share with you is accompanied by a simple lightbulb that would shine at the right moment.
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If it seems simplistic and inadequate, it was, even in 1951.
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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
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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!
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(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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(And, if you’ve enjoyed it, you might enjoy the parallel thread called When Keyboards Were Desks: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/when-keyboards-were-desks-190598 …)
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End of conversation
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