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Those wide DECwriters were the standard console terminals for DEC systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is the only kind of terminal shown on the cover
by jonjacky 2y ago
Those wide DECwriters were the standard console terminals for DEC systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is the only kind of terminal shown on the cover and interior of DEC's VAX-11/780 Hardware Handbook [1] (especially see Preface p. x)
We had two of these, for our VAX 11/780 (delivered 1980) and PDP 11/23 (1981).
You wanted a printed record of everything that happened at the console. A system crash would print a register dump and other information that would scroll out of sight on a video terminal (there were no scrollback buffers then).
1. https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece447/s15/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=vax_hwhbk_1979.pdf https://course.ece.cmu.edu/~ece447/s15/lib/exe/fetch.php?med...