I just searched for and found the Tektronix 4051 Basic Reference Card in my stash ... In the summer of 1980, I wrote software (as an intern) for a Tektronix 4054. The system was complemented by a unit with two 8-inch floppy drives (called File Manager), a printer (called Hard Copy Unit), and a plotter, all interconnected via GPIB. It was the first time I got paid for writing software. It was for the production of heat exchangers which were mounted on the roofs of factory buildings to salvage the thermal energy in the exhaust air. The devices were manufactured for custom dimensions. The order data came in via FAX and were entered into the computer. The program computed the dimensions of the parts for the housing and plotted the drawings for the sheet metals. The bill of materials was printed out. The thing worked reasonably well, although the usability could have been better. We did not use the term CAD at that time, but that's what it was. After finishing my job, I was allowed to show the computer to a colleague who was the top computer geek at our school. We ran the Leibniz Series to calculate Pi and tested how long it took to compute it up to a given number of terms. We enjoyed the sheer speed of the computations. The Tektronix 4054 was so much more powerful than any other machine we had access to.
I had no idea the original intention was to make the 4052 firmware compatible with the 4051. I used both in my work at a Tektronix field service center, and my recollection is that the '52 was pretty consistently at least 10x as fast as the '51.
Thank you for this video! I love the performance of my Tektronix 4054A vector graphics computer and still enjoy writing BASIC programs for it. Right now I'm working on trying to port Atari Asteroids arcade game to the 4054A with Option 30 - which I think may be one of the first GPUs! I heard that Tektronix engineers had developed an Asteroids game for the 4054 Option 30.
Wow a lot work to get some speed. Clearly not a carefully considered approach. The 74181 ALUs were certainly capable of 8X even if only 8 bits wide. Maybe memory speed was the problem. Sounds like a lack of knowledge and understanding on many fronts. But then RAM and EEPROM would struggle at a microsecond. Probably too much unnecessary floating point to generate l2 bits of result to drive the available screen resolution. I used a Tek 611 display back then for graphics on a PDP-8 minicomputer. It was driven by analog hardware to generate lines, arcs and circles. Its only limitation on speed was the write rate of the tube.
Why did they even bother making this when it would have been cheaper for customers to just wait for a good windows program or a dos application to come along or be written in house to handle what I can only imagine was graphing and visualization of data using Real Time Data off of the Scope's GPIB output bus. This whole product line just doesnt make a whole lot of sense,..
The graphics on early PCs was horrible, compared with what the high-end graphics terminals could do in the early-1980s. That's the bottom line. Sure, you could wait for newer technology. If you could wait. What were you supposed to do while you were waiting?
Well, it made a lot of money. From the late 60's to the early 80's, Tektronix dominated the computer graphics market. Graphics products made up from a third to half of Tek's revenue during that period.
I just searched for and found the Tektronix 4051 Basic Reference Card in my stash ...
In the summer of 1980, I wrote software (as an intern) for a Tektronix 4054.
The system was complemented by a unit with two 8-inch floppy drives (called File Manager), a printer (called Hard Copy Unit), and a plotter, all interconnected via GPIB.
It was the first time I got paid for writing software. It was for the production of heat exchangers which were mounted on the roofs of factory buildings to salvage the thermal energy in the exhaust air. The devices were manufactured for custom dimensions. The order data came in via FAX and were entered into the computer. The program computed the dimensions of the parts for the housing and plotted the drawings for the sheet metals. The bill of materials was printed out. The thing worked reasonably well, although the usability could have been better. We did not use the term CAD at that time, but that's what it was.
After finishing my job, I was allowed to show the computer to a colleague who was the top computer geek at our school. We ran the Leibniz Series to calculate Pi and tested how long it took to compute it up to a given number of terms. We enjoyed the sheer speed of the computations. The Tektronix 4054 was so much more powerful than any other machine we had access to.
I had no idea the original intention was to make the 4052 firmware compatible with the 4051. I used both in my work at a Tektronix field service center, and my recollection is that the '52 was pretty consistently at least 10x as fast as the '51.
Nice descripions Bob!
Thank you for this video! I love the performance of my Tektronix 4054A vector graphics computer and still enjoy writing BASIC programs for it. Right now I'm working on trying to port Atari Asteroids arcade game to the 4054A with Option 30 - which I think may be one of the first GPUs! I heard that Tektronix engineers had developed an Asteroids game for the 4054 Option 30.
Interesting how the 6800 lineage was dealt with
Wow a lot work to get some speed. Clearly not a carefully considered approach. The 74181 ALUs were certainly capable of 8X even if only 8 bits wide. Maybe memory speed was the problem. Sounds like a lack of knowledge and understanding on many fronts. But then RAM and EEPROM would struggle at a microsecond. Probably too much unnecessary floating point to generate l2 bits of result to drive the available screen resolution. I used a Tek 611 display back then for graphics on a PDP-8 minicomputer. It was driven by analog hardware to generate lines, arcs and circles. Its only limitation on speed was the write rate of the tube.
Why did they even bother making this when it would have been cheaper for customers to just wait for a good windows program or a dos application to come along or be written in house to handle what I can only imagine was graphing and visualization of data using Real Time Data off of the Scope's GPIB output bus. This whole product line just doesnt make a whole lot of sense,..
The graphics on early PCs was horrible, compared with what the high-end graphics terminals could do in the early-1980s. That's the bottom line. Sure, you could wait for newer technology. If you could wait. What were you supposed to do while you were waiting?
Well, it made a lot of money. From the late 60's to the early 80's, Tektronix dominated the computer graphics market. Graphics products made up from a third to half of Tek's revenue during that period.