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https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html says it had a "neon-orange plasma display", which would have been pretty advanced

by pm215 3y ago

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html says it had a "neon-orange plasma display", which would have been pretty advanced for the time.

kragen 3y ago
the neon-orange plasma displays invented for the plato system in the late 01960s had an enormous, unique advantage for this kind of thing they were bistable and switchable! so you could have a 512×512 display which had, in the physical display itself, 262144 bits of memory, equivalent to 32768 bytes. by contrast (heh), a lcd or normal crt fades in a second or two if you don't redraw it, which means you need a separate memory somewhere to hold the data to redraw, memory you have to run through many times a second in order to generate a steady display the tektronix 4010 and 4014 graphics terminals (derived from the tektronix type 564 and the hughes aircraft company model 104d) had a similarly bistable crt, making it possible to do detailed high-resolution graphics at an affordable cost, but you couldn't erase pixels; you could only erase the whole screen so normal plato users enjoyed multiple fonts, equations with superscripts and subscripts, and full-screen high-resolution graphics that users of other systems could only dream of, unless they had enough money to devote tens of kilobytes of ram to a framebuffer—which, of course, is precisely what the gas-plasma display inspired alan kay to lead a group at xerox parc to start doing, a few years later (why didn't people use the plasma panels for computer ram? because they were slooow. updating a pixel took on the order of a millisecond. same reason they didn't use dekatrons or ne-3 lamps) brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ http://friendlyorangeglow.com/
- rbanffy 3y ago
  This one seems to be 12 rows of 32 columns. Still pretty cool. I wish I could find an 80x24 one (or two 40x24) for a sensible price. Would be lovely for a text-only terminal thingie. > brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project It's an interesting book, full of interesting stories. It is a bit confusing though, as it goes back and forth in time quite a lot - it has a very Primer-like timeline.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    Toshiba had plasma luggables in the 80s.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      And with VGA displays. My favourite though is the IBM 3290 terminal.

by pm215 3y ago

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/q1.html says it had a "neon-orange plasma display", which would have been pretty advanced for the time.

kragen 3y ago

the neon-orange plasma displays invented for the plato system in the late 01960s had an enormous, unique advantage for this kind of thing they were bistable and switchable! so you could have a 512×512 display which had, in the physical display itself, 262144 bits of memory, equivalent to 32768 bytes. by contrast (heh), a lcd or normal crt fades in a second or two if you don't redraw it, which means you need a separate memory somewhere to hold the data to redraw, memory you have to run through many times a second in order to generate a steady display the tektronix 4010 and 4014 graphics terminals (derived from the tektronix type 564 and the hughes aircraft company model 104d) had a similarly bistable crt, making it possible to do detailed high-resolution graphics at an affordable cost, but you couldn't erase pixels; you could only erase the whole screen so normal plato users enjoyed multiple fonts, equations with superscripts and subscripts, and full-screen high-resolution graphics that users of other systems could only dream of, unless they had enough money to devote tens of kilobytes of ram to a framebuffer—which, of course, is precisely what the gas-plasma display inspired alan kay to lead a group at xerox parc to start doing, a few years later (why didn't people use the plasma panels for computer ram? because they were slooow. updating a pixel took on the order of a millisecond. same reason they didn't use dekatrons or ne-3 lamps) brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project http://friendlyorangeglow.com/ http://friendlyorangeglow.com/

rbanffy 3y ago
This one seems to be 12 rows of 32 columns. Still pretty cool. I wish I could find an 80x24 one (or two 40x24) for a sensible price. Would be lovely for a text-only terminal thingie. > brian dear wrote a very interesting book about the history of the plato project It's an interesting book, full of interesting stories. It is a bit confusing though, as it goes back and forth in time quite a lot - it has a very Primer-like timeline.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Toshiba had plasma luggables in the 80s.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    And with VGA displays. My favourite though is the IBM 3290 terminal.