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hpr3815 :: The UNIVAC Uniscope - The first terminal with a video monitor

Hear about the Uniscope 300 mainframe terminal from 1964.

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Hosted by Deltaray on 2023-03-17 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
computer history, terminals. 2.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr3815

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Duration: 00:39:05

general.

In the early days of computing, the computing power was kept in centralized large mainframes and users would connect to them via so called "dumb" terminals. These often provided their output through a printer and continuous feed of paper. However in 1964 UNIVAC introduced the Uniscope 300, which was one of the first terminals to provide a video monitor for display. With the introduction of this system came the introduction of several concepts that we take for granted today and they are described during the reading of this brochure.

The brochure was made available through the Computer History Museum at https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102646317

As I mention in the episode, $15,000 USD in 1964 is worth considerably more today, according to an online inflation calculator it is now worth approximately $144,000 today. So even if that was for 48 terminals as it seems to mention in the hand written note, that might equate to about $3000 per terminal in 2023 dollars.

Here are some related links below:


Comments

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Comment #1 posted on 2023-03-24 18:16:11 by mirwi

Second delete key -> carriage return?

Hello, loved the show! It is sometimes nice to remember where we came from, to better appreciate what we have now.

Just one thought: Could the "second delete" key have been the carriage return key? Line feed and returning to the first character of a line are separate signals after all. Or at least they were back then.

Regards, mirwi

Comment #2 posted on 2023-03-27 03:07:54 by Deltaray

Documentation on keyboard layout

I found this module in PDF that has a description of several of the keys on Univac terminals of the time.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/manuals/pdf/Uniscope/UP-7778r2_Uniscope_Display_Terminal_Operators_Manual_1974.pdf

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