Pre-Raster Graphics
David Gesswein is considered to be one of the reigning experts in DEC’s PDP-8. Almost every time I’ve been to a VCF East, David is there with a PDP-8 of some kind, usually an 8/e, and this time was no exception. He took portraits with a modern camera, then converted them to ASCII and printed them out on a large, beautiful, dot-matrix printer -- I plan on framing mine!
There was also a Tektronix 4014 showing just how much resolution the 1970s had to offer (if only in monochrome). Brian Stuart, who had the exhibit on Forth, borrowed this terminal to test one of his programs on the authentic piece of kit and it was beautiful. If I understand correctly, unlike other terminals of the era, Tektronix graphical terminals had on-board storage to keep images locally. You’ll note the bank of circuit boards that sat in the cabinet under the CRT to facilitate storage and precision graphical rendering.
Lastly, David had a really cool Calcomp 563 plotter drawing really cool artwork, one line at a time. Makes me want a plotter...
“Multiple graphics technologies will be exhibited that were common before raster graphics won. See 4K graphics on a 1970s Tektronix 4014 vector storage terminal. Have your picture taken by a PDP-8 computer and printed on a 200 line-per-minute chain printer in glorious ASCII art. See a pen plotter operate.”
