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<!--#REDIRECT [[:Category:4000-Series Terminals]] --> | <!--#REDIRECT [[:Category:4000-Series Terminals]] --> | ||
Regarding the '''Tektronix 4100-Series terminals''', ex-Tek employee Dave Brown recalls: | |||
<blockquote> | |||
The 4100 series was an intelligent family of terminals that added segment capability to Tek Graphics. | |||
They would fully emulate the [[4010]]/[[4014]] family. | |||
Segments allowed you to define a graphic object or string and display it. | |||
Rather than going back to the host to redraw, you could change the viewport to zoom | |||
and pan and it would do so from the stored data. | |||
The [[4114]] was a [[DVST]] so limited to vectors. | |||
Others in the family were the [[4012]] mono raster, | |||
[[4013]] color raster, and [[4115]] high resolution color with auto convergence. | |||
They had some 3D models as well. | |||
With the raster products you had the ability to define polygons | |||
and the ordering would handle hidden line and polygons if I remember right. | |||
They also handled shading and patterns. | |||
As such, I don’t know how much of this propagated to the 4114. | |||
I suspect if you defined a polygon it would draw the outline. | |||
Segments could also be stored on the floppy disks and recalled. | |||
I suspect you could do forms and such also but after 40 years I just don’t recall the details. | |||
I was buried down in the hardware and OS and never really used them for graphics. | |||
We might have a brochure on them although the catalogs probably have a good overview description. | |||
I wasn’t close to the vector generator design. | |||
I do know you needed it fast and you wanted a constant velocity so line thickness would be uniform. | |||
There was usually a lot of circuitry to deal with D/A glitches and the like. | |||
Hardcopy and write-through also added challenges. | |||
Then of course they had to deal with idiosyncrasies of the 4014. | |||
The 4014 supported 132 characters in alpha mode. | |||
But you could position the beam at the far right, put it back into alpha, | |||
and print a character in the 133 column so of course they had to support that. | |||
There were a few others. | |||
</blockquote> |