A vector graphics workstation from the 70s | Hacker News Reader

A vector graphics workstation from the 70s

justanotherelectronicsblog.com

204 pointsibobev51 comments

I am obsessed with Vector computing and I recently became the lucky owner of a Vectrex.

Projects like the VecFever, and PiTrex, exist to make it possible to combine vector displays with much more modern CPU technology, allowing emulating even old Vector arcade titles like Star Wars or Battlezone.

It is criminal that Vector Computing never took off past the 1980s, and has died. Nothing, not even OLEDs (sorry Vectrex-Mini guys!) can replicate the beauty of phosphor glow.

Speaking of amazing forgotten lighting effects, the techniques for the cool lighting effects used in Don Bluth films (and his games like Dragons Lair) are also forgotten/unused and I find them analogous to vector displays.

I find the death of Vector Displays and the cool display tech Don Bluth did to be great examples of "Worse is Better" and counterexamples to the idea that progress overtime inevitably makes things better.

I wanted a TechTronix vector computer super bad, and still do, especially the one's with the fast 3D and color add-ons.

I'll drop a few motivating videos:

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M98VOoGFLL8 (TekTronix 3D/Color stuff)

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Dv15YRAmzM

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j60DV0Ujp_E

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAPHGBM2sQ8

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUB6OYeCKek

Get Scramble and let me know if you can beat it. At a young age, that game destroyed any interest I had in video games. I played Scramble for hours, always dying at the same point over and over.

You may enjoy bitluni's homemade laser vector tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdo3djJrw9o

I bet you'd love the GT40! It had a lunar lander game with an easter egg: a McDonalds on the moon.

I wonder if Lars got a GT40 emulator working with SIMH:

https://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/1AQn3HSi/simulating-a...

https://fritzm.github.io/gt40.html

This looks like it:

https://github.com/Isysxp/GT40

Playing Moonlander (LEM):

https://github.com/Isysxp/GT40/blob/master/PDP11/lunar11/lun...

The restoration of a GT40 to play lunar lander | VCFMW 18 (2023):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4lPE5Nytfc

Oh man, the first graphics code I ever wrote used Tektronix vector commands for drawing. It used ASCII escape sequences to specify diagonal lines on the screen, but, as I recall you could also tell it that instead of drawing a diagonal line, you could have it draw a rectangle with what would have been the endpoints of the diagonal line being opposite corners of the rectangle. These codes were supported by some VT-series graphics terminals as well as at least one dial-up terminal program on the PC back in the 80s so that’s what I targeted on my code (which was a DVI previewer for TeX running under VM/CMS).

The original Tektronix terminals (I only ever saw one once) did all screen drawing with these vector commands (think the look of the classic Asteroids game which I think may have used a similar hardware interface to the CRT display), which naturally was not especially fast for ordinary text which is why hybrids like the abovementioned VT-series terminal (I think it was the 240/340/440 that had this) ended up supplanting the Tektronix displays.

LSI ADM 5 terminals also had a vector graphics option (not sure if it was ever available for the ADM 3[a] nor if it was compatible with Tektronix graphics)

I owned an ADM3a and used it often back in the days of 300 and 1200 baud modems. My recollection is that it was just a dumb TTY.

The ADM3a was just a UART chip, RAM chips, character ROMs, and a bunch of 74LS chips to glue it all together. No CPU, and no way to generate graphics.

Just to clarify, I think a lot of the Tek terminals that could generate graphics also lacked CPUs.

The ADM3A was slightly more than a dumb TTY; it supported direct cursor addressing despite being made of SSI TTL chips. It was the main platform for vi. I bought a used one at a government surplus auction and, many years later, wrote an emulator. Thanks to termcap/terminfo, most TUI programs work adequately on an ADM3A emulator.

No graphics, though, not even TRS-80-style pseudographics. Not even inverse video.

You can switch a normal xterm to Tektronix mode and do the same commands today!

Some tools like plotutils and gnuplot (please, fix that hell of license) can still output to Tek displays, either real ones or emulated.

> (please, fix that hell of license)

What do you mean?

The gnuplot one.

I think the Gnuplot license is uncontroversially a GPL-incompatible free software license? https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#gnuplot

I had to look it up, it's a little obnoxious but it's weird enough that I like it. The intent appears to be that modified versions of gnuplot have to be very clear and explicit that they are not gnuplot or made by the gnuplot team. anyway, here it is. At least it's still shorter than the gpl.

   * Copyright 1986 - 1993, 1998, 2004   Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley
   *
   * Permission to use, copy, and distribute this software and its
   * documentation for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted,
   * provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and
   * that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear
   * in supporting documentation.
   *
   * Permission to modify the software is granted, but not the right to
   * distribute the complete modified source code.  Modifications are to
   * be distributed as patches to the released version.  Permission to
   * distribute binaries produced by compiling modified sources is granted,
   * provided you
   *   1. distribute the corresponding source modifications from the
   *    released version in the form of a patch file along with the binaries,
   *   2. add special version identification to distinguish your version
   *    in addition to the base release version number,
   *   3. provide your name and address as the primary contact for the
   *    support of your modified version, and
   *   4. retain our contact information in regard to use of the base
   *    software.
   * Permission to distribute the released version of the source code along
   * with corresponding source modifications in the form of a patch file is
   * granted with same provisions 2 through 4 for binary distributions.
   *
   * This software is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty
   * to the extent permitted by applicable law.

One of my first jobs I worked in a government agency that still had Tektronix 4054 series used for capturing paper street maps point by point into a GIS via a large digitizer and puck that sat next to the system. These models had the dynamic graphics option 30 module which gives you both the static vector display (that required you to clear the entire screen), and a dynamic vector display which could be updated in real time for text entry etc. The Option 30 worked by driving the screen at a lower current and refreshing just those vectors constantly. Given the low res pixel displays of that era, even these dated displays were a great solution for that task, because the resolution was extremely high.

I remember being skeptical that all that electronic map data would be very useful to anyone outside the agency without all of the required hardware. How little I knew!

Love Tektronix vector computers. xterm can run Tek vector commands (search for "Tektronix xterm" such as the last time it came up on here) and I think a few demos are even included in some distros.

kitty doesn't have Tektronix vector support right? Would be cool if they would consider adding.

But something interesting happened recently which is that it is now apparently a given that terminal programs support raster graphics. At least, the people at r/command line were treating it as such when someone recently posted a program that requires something like kitty graphics protocol to work at all.

The kitty raster protocol is somewhat efficient. It could be interesting to combine that with some ideas for low latency lightweight computing and social networking.

The simplest version of that might be just to have a group of people start setting up some type of BBSs over ssh, but designed to upgrade the graphics just slightly over ANSI, or even perhaps combined with ANSI. People could use emulated vector monochrome graphics for some screens if they wanted that Tek vibe.

Another step up possibly would be to make a few STUN/TURN servers or some setup so people on IPV6 could find and each other even if at home and if IPV4 still connect with whatever NAT traversal or maybe there can be such as thing as ssh over WebRTC? That might not make sense.

You could also make it content centric and set up something to easily do RSS over IPFS (I assume that exists) with a group that has agreed they will target ANSI plus kitty graphics with some set document size limits to keep things fast and lightweight.

Because kitty graphics are based on escape codes, you might also use such a social network for distributing lightweight (binary size limited) web assembly applications and games that are designed to run in a terminal supporting that. Because web assembly runtime support for text output is good I believe.

I do think that there should be some built in load latency or data size limit tested and enforced somehow to ensure that you keep the snappiness possible with text interfaces.

Mh... that's interesting and I would like to work on that on week ends.

The printers for these used a special vacuum tube for memory derived from the kind in television cameras.

They were massive and printed a whole page at a time, similar to the thermal page printers from Perkin-Elmer for their model 3600 Intelligent Terminal of the early 1980's, but P-E printers were much smaller by then.

3600 had vector graphics too, these were very expensive but introduced the form factor of a horizontal box with two 5 1/4 floppies, monitor on top and wired keyboard with the first row of "F" function keys people had seen. Which is the desktop form that was later adopted by IBM when they issued their first PC.

> "special vacuum tube for memory derived from the kind in television cameras"

A Williams Tube?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube

Not a Williams tube, but similar in principle.

On a CRT with storage for oscilloscopes or computer monitors, you looked at the stored image, which is why they were called "Direct-view bistable storage tubes".

On the Williams tubes, the processor read back the data stored in the tube, i.e. the stored image was used by the CPU, not by humans, so Williams tubes had no need to contain fluorescent screens. On a viewing tube, there was usually no need to implement a read back method, but only means for writing and erasing.

Both the Williams tubes and the direct-view storage tubes were derived from the iconoscope tubes used before WWII in the early television cameras, according to a proposal made in the famous von Neumann report. In iconoscope tubes, illumination caused by an external image projected on the tube face created an electric charge distribution inside the tube, which was read electronically, generating thus a video signal, so it was the inverse of a direct-view tube, where an electric charge distribution is written inside the tube, where it controls the fluorescence of the screen, creating an image that can be viewed outside. Both iconoscope tubes and direct-view storage tubes differ from simple CRTs by having inside an insulating or semiconducting surface on which a distribution of electric charge can be stored.

The Williams tubes were a form of DRAM. An even earlier kind of DRAM had been used in the Atanasoff-Berry computer, where it was implemented with discrete capacitors and John Atanasoff had been the first who proposed to make a computer memory based on storing electric charge and refreshing it periodically, to prevent discharging.

I have an artifact that looks like 2 Williams tube fused together at the ends. No idea what it is.

If they are fused on their faces, i.e. with the connection pins on their opposite sides, it may be a combination of a viewing storage tube with a TV camera tube, which could have been used for conversion between different TV standards, e.g. American <=> European.

I believe it's fused on the pin side >=<. I will double check and thanks for the idea. I'm about to start documenting all of the artifacts I have purchased over the past (gulp) 25+ years.

Before Postscript, tektronix 4010 was the language of graphics, at least for biologists drawing phylogenetic trees or reassociation curves. The phylip phylogenetics package, introduced around 1980, still has the option to generate trees in tek4010 format.

Storage tubes are amazing. I once had a Tektronix 464 scope. Unlike the ubiquitous 465, the 464 was an analog storage oscilloscope! The persistence of the storage tube let you capture pulses, visualize signal jitter, etc. And there was a very satisfying erase button that cleared the tube with the characteristic green flash.

You could also just mess with the horizontal/vertical position knobs and use it as a very expensive Etch-a-Sketch.

It's been a while, so I went to Wikipedia for a refresher. These things really are amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_tube#Storage

Unlike a television CRT, the storage tube will "remember" everywhere the electron beam struck the screen as long as the voltage is below the erase threshold.

What's wild is that this information can be read back out of the device. So, it's not just a display but also memory. It's a destructive reading process (not unlike core memory) where detection is also erasure, but it really is RAM... of a sort.

I used one of these in 1978 or so, when it was the hotness, so it's great to see the restoration.

However, I am compelled to point out that it doesn't have a "1024*780 pixel resolution", because it doesn't have pixels. Maybe "1024*780 vector endpoint precision"?

The engineering on anything made by Tek is nothing short of amazing. I've a really old 'regular' scope (ok, what's really, old, by Tek standards it is still young) and a much smaller and lighter (and a bit less deep) digital one, an anemic TDS 210 that is more than good enough for any of my needs these days. But if you ever have the opportunity to have a close look at one of those scope racks on trolleys be prepared to be amazed, especially when you learn when it was made.

Author here, if someone has specific questions, or ideas on programs to run on this, do let me know!

Try out plotutils and Gnuplot. Not sure what the options for SVG conversion and the CSS box model are...

My main used of the Tektronix terminal was to preview troff[0] output before sending the final product to the phototypesetter[1], which cost a nominal fee per page as I recall.

[0] Unix program to format high quality printed documents, similar to newspaper/magazine/book printing

[1]machine using photographic paper to output typeset pages, supporting a variety of fonts

I bought a Tektronix 4014 in 1991 and had it until 2016. During that time it never required any repairs or calibration. Built like a tank. The guy I sold it to had to replace capacitors in the power supply, and still uses it today.

An incredible machine. I didn't remember this one had a dot-matrix font - later ones had a vector-based one. I'd love to see the definitions for this latter screen font.

Check out HP plotter fonts from the 1980's.

You should have seen the digitizing tables 4 feet square, and the oversized plotters that were surplus from oil companies after the oil price crash at the end of 1981.

I don't know if anyone has dumped the Tek font ROMs, but the IMLAC Scroll Saver tty emulator has been preserved, and I converted its typewriter font to Hershey font format.

Scroll Saver disassembly: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/f6408e16cb1aaf7f2583c02cd...

My kludge to parse it into Hershey JHF format: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/imlacparse.py

The resulting Hershey font: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/imlac-pds-1-ssvchr.22.j...

Its appearance rendered: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/smolhershey-imlac.png

My 400-byte BSD-licensed C library for using Hershey fonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/smolhershey.md.html

If someone does get the Tek font, I'd love to do the same thing with it.

I was curious about the BASIC capabilities, so

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/tektronix/405x/070-2142-02_Tek_405...

GPIB! Also known as IEEE 488, it was the USB of the 70s.

This sort of older tech always amazes me. Also how insanely expensive ("or around $30.000 in 2025 money") it cost

Same even with the launch price of the original Apple computer. iirc some $4,000. Helps justify buying as much computer as you can afford for side projects/home research.

What applications and workflows were these workstations typically used for?

> But can it run DOOM?

>No[t yet…]

I believe in the community making this a yes.

I'd love to see that, but for this model that might be too much to ask. The 4054 had some options to accelerate drawings, and that might be able to pull it off! This video (timestamped) shows off some cool grahpic tricks it can do: https://youtu.be/M98VOoGFLL8?si=NRwLTqXqObvePrPk&t=190

this is a really excellent demo thanks! Watching, I still have to remind myself that the persistence is from the screen itself, not being refreshed transparently!

If you can render a frame then it runs - the rest is just optimizing FPS.

> within the culture of DROE, simply getting Doom displayed on the screen of a novel device has been sufficient to consider the game played on that technology

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SFm1dS6myqq7psBKttP7CVYN... “1-Bit Pixels Encoded in E. Coli for the Display of Interactive Digital Media”

We do have so much cool tech nowadays that I don't understand why I find this that cool.

This is cooler than cool.

Amazing demos!

barney being the only one whose name isn't capitalized is a low blow.

Did he really need that crazy probe or was that a joke? Normal probes that come with Fluke 179 couldn't do it? I guess mine says 1000V so not rated for it. Do they even make 4000V handheld meters? How are you supposed to do the calibration?

I'm sure you could solder together some 1kV 1MΩ resistors, but if you can buy a 10kV probe designed, built, and tested by people who do that every day, betting your life on your DIY creepage allowances may seem unappealing.

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