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
Writing a book about the history of keyboards: http://aresluna.org/shift-happens · Design manager @figmadesign · Typographer · Occasional speaker · He/him
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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
Hi I'm researching bunker-ramo / nasdaq and I was wondering why these terminals were not qwerty. One advertisement I read suggested their terminal was good for people "who don't type too well"?pic.twitter.com/hckboNuX17
A few thoughts: 1. What you just said. Before microcomputers, touch typing (and QWERTY) were more feminine activities, so perhaps if those were operated by men, this was meant to help.
2. Form factor. QWERTY doesn’t go vertical and you often see alphabetic layouts where keyboards are tall (see: new parking meters).
3. It might be that a competitor (Quotron?) started this layout and Bunker-Ramo just wanted to follow? Not sure about the timelines of those things.
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