Knight TV Resurrection (2018)

pdp-6.net

26 points·rbanffy··9 comments

Short thread at the time with some author comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17659799

The regular way you did graphics with a PDP-10 or 11 was

https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VK100

It had ANSI escape sequences equivalent to CIRCLE or LINE like you'd find in microcomputer BASIC except the Gigi was much more colorful than any early micro.

Gigi did ReGIS graphics, IIRC. Later VT terminals also did it, but were far less programmable than the Gigi.

The GiGi could run BASIC locally for one thing, although we never got to do it with the one that was connected a PDP-11 at the high school in Peterborough, NH. Instead we used BASIC-PLUS where you could print escape codes to do gfx.

I'm currently in the process of understanding how all that works. Modern terminals should all support ReGIS and Tektronix graphics.

These are an interesting design, especially with the remote-terminal aspects. I do wonder how the CRTs were driven at that resolution.

Long phosphor and coaxial cable perhaps. Maybe repeaters. It's less bad with digital signals with a fixed pixel clock.

This has now reached the masses with the sale of over 9000... I mean 800 PiDP-10 units. Oscar is kind of pushing ITS as the premier PDP-10 operating system.

Indeed. I was caught measuring the (very limited) wall space in my office. For a 10 and an 11.

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