Artifact Details

Description

Purdue Video Terminal created by Robert Belleville as part of his PhD work at Purdue (1971-1974).

Many functions of this Terminal were inspired by Belleville's visit to a 1973 conference held at Argonne National Labs near Chicago that was touted as the first ever conference on raster graphics. The conference was attended by John Warnock and Ivan Sutherland as well as 30 or so others. During this conference, Belleville was "transformed by the vision of using TV like technology instead of vector graphic displays such as the CDC 252 unit he had programmed at Purdue during his masters in 1969."

Image index:
01 - terminal in our CAD lab with keyset and joystick and video camera
02 - rear view with electroncs under the table and in the leg
03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09 - block diagrams of the components (drawn on the calcomp plotter)
04 - the Imlac setup in our CAD lab
off screen to the left
a/d d/a audio gear serial patch panel etc
the Imlac disk in red
above it is a small crt used for the scan output
wooden box one of my video terminal
a homemade keyset
the Imlac vector display
(the Imlac computer is under the table with cards visible under the stapler is a digitizing tablet)
some random bit of lab gear (voltmeter or power supply or perhaps the tablet electronics)
a video camera to take images from the Imlac and send them to the video terminal
11 - block diagram for a character generator
12 and 13 - 'graphics' on a character display from a basic program
14 - additional view of the terminal
15 - another block diagram
16 - camera video of a drawing
17 - some basic code
18 - camera video mixed with a on screen cursor
19 - cursor block diagram
20 - Mrs Garrett using a flashlight to drive the cursor

Date

1974

Extent

20 images

Format

TIF

Category

Slide

Credit

Gift of Robert Belleville

Lot Number

X7996.2017