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Tektronix 4014
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Tektronix' 4000 series was a family of text and graphics computer terminals based on the company's storage tube technology. No additional electronics were needed to maintain the display, so the 4000 series were less expensive than earlier graphics terminals and became widely used in the CAD market in the 1970s and 80s. They remained popular until the introduction of inexpensive graphics workstations in the 1980s, which used raster displays and inexpensive screen buffers in place of custom hardware.
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Tektronix' 4000 series was a family of text and graphics computer terminals based on the company's storage tube technology. No additional electronics were needed to maintain the display, so the 4000 series were less expensive than earlier graphics terminals and became widely used in the CAD market in the 1970s and 80s. They remained popular until the introduction of inexpensive graphics workstations in the 1980s, which used raster displays and inexpensive screen buffers in place of custom hardware. There were several members of the family introduced through the 1970s, the best known being the 4010, 4014, 4100 and 4200.
Prior to the 4010, most computer graphics was done with vector graphics displays that continuously repainted the image under computer control. This required a very high bandwidth connection to the computer, which generally meant the display could be no more than a dozen or so meters from the computer. The modern approach of having a local memory in the display that stores a value for each pixel would have been prohibitively expensive in the 1970s. Tektronix solved this problem by developing the Direct View Bistable Storage Tube (DVBST) CRT, which allowed the use of a slower, serial, data connection combined with a vector graphics generator that only needed to write the vectors (the graphic data) to the CRT once. Having had data written, the CRT itself remembered the data.
Individual portions of the image could not be erased, however. Instead, the entire stored image was erased as a whole and the process caused the entire screen to flash bright green. This led to the 4014 terminal being nicknamed the mean green flashin' machine.
For graphics input, the terminal used a pair of thumb wheels on the keyboard to control the position of a cursor. The cursor was displayed using a lower intensity of the electron beam that was insufficient to store the cursor's image. Instead, the cursor was dynamically refreshed by the electronics of the terminal.
The 4014 had a series of commands for drawing both text and graphics. The 4014 command set became a de facto standard and when personal computers with graphics displays became common in the 1990s, many communications packages included the ability to accept Tektronix 4014 commands. Because of this the designation "(Tektronix) 4014" has entered the traditional computing vocabulary, leading to the memory of the terminal long after the actual hardware became obsolete and otherwise disappeared.
The Tektronix direct-view storage tube was first used in the Tektronix 564 oscilloscope in 1963 and was first used for non-oscilloscope applications in the 601 monitor in 1968.
Another early device was called ARDS for Advanced Remote Display Station and originated at MIT's Project MAC. In addition, Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts sold a graphics system called the KV8I (later, KV8E) that used a Tektronix 603 storage display as its output device with the KV8I generating the vectors.
The first Tektronix computer terminal to use a storage tube was the T4002 Terminal, and the first member of the 4010 Series was the 4010, introduced around 1972. Other models included the 4014, 4105, and 4016-1. Several peripherals were available, including the 4631 Hard Copy Unit, which produced screenshots on dry silver paper that were then heat-developed in the printer.
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