4601

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The Tektronix 4601 is a printer for getting a paper copy of the information on the screen of a storage monitor. It was introduced in 1970.

The 4601 is based on a special CRT (T6110-203, 154-0629-00) that incorporated a ceramic funnel and a fiber optic faceplate to collimate the emitted light. It exposed 3M-made Type 777 light-sensitive, dry-silver paper paper a line at a time.

Dan Denham recalls:

[...] Thus began the Terminal group. We always had "Display" in our title, but really were a computer terminal group.

The group was expanded to include Digital Engineers and Software Engineers. John Griffin was placed in charge of terminal development and Chuck Gibson headed up a group to design a printer.

The 611 became the core of a storage tube computer terminal. In 1968 I left the group temporarily and moved to Corvallis. I attended OSU for 2 years at Tektronix's expense. The group developed and introduced to the world the storage tube terminal. I returned to Tek in 1970 as an Engineer and was assigned to Chuck's group working on several different projects. This was the beginning of the real fun years for me.

We tried all kinds of ideas while Chuck and a few folks introduced the printer using 3M's Dry Silver paper printer. None of this work had much digital circuitry, it was basically all analog circuitry. In those days memory came in 2k memory chips.

Prices

Year	Catalog price	In 2026 dollars
1971	$3,750	~$30,600

Pictures

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  T6110 4601 CRT

Components

Some Parts Used in the 4601