(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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Replying to @mwichary
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
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Replying to @UlyssesPascal
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.
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Replying to @mwichary @UlyssesPascal
2. Form factor. QWERTY doesn’t go vertical and you often see alphabetic layouts where keyboards are tall (see: new parking meters).
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Replying to @mwichary @UlyssesPascal
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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