On 6/27/25 15:12, Steve Litt via Talk wrote:
Back in the 80s, I was a computer tech, maintaining systems from Data General, DEC, DEC was great. I used several PDP 11s and 1 VAX. On PDP 11, we used RT/11 running TSX to give it multiuser capability.
Collins & Prime. Prime was great. I used a Prime as a student at Santa Monica Community College in the 1980's. They must have had about 60 Wyse terminals hooked to that thing via serial cables, and there were never any problems.
We had 7 VAX 11/780s, several PDP-11s and one, count 'em, 1 PDP-8i! While I worked on all the systems I mentioned, I spent most of my time on Data General systems. There were several techs where I worked and we tended to specialize on which systems we worked on. One of the things I did was hand wire an Ethernet controller on a prototyping board for an Eclipse computer. I'm probably the only one on this list who has ever done anything like that. We didn't have any Wyse terminals, mostly DEC & Data Generals, though we also had a bunch on Ontel smart terminals, which, IIRC, were made in Canada. I also used to work on some really dumb (retarded? 😉) terminals that had absolutely no smarts and relied on a Data General Nova to do simple text editing, etc.. These were so old they used an acoustic delay line for memory!