Beehive terminals

[Richard]

In article <200512292122510380.1733CE16 at 10.0.0.252>,
    "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com>  writes:

> No, but they sound about the same.  Beige pebble-painted slab-sided cases
> with a sloping top (I think they were actually made of welded sheets of
> aluminum), detachable keyboard with a thick grey cable and some keys with
> little bi-pin lamps under them to indicate modes.  Rotary control on a
> small black panel on the back to set the bitrate from 110-9600(?).    Shift
> register memory and some 1702s for ROM.  IIRC,  end-of-line was something
> like 0x1f.  Bronze-tinted sheet of plexiglass over the screen.  Keys were
> light brown and the keyboard mask was dark brown.  IIRC, the thing couldn't
> actually display and scroll at 9600, so handshaking at higher speeds was
> required.  I still may have some code around that I used to drive one.  I
> think I remember that you could fire off some combinations of codes that
> would cause them to hang.

YES!  These are the exact models we used.  Of course we were across
town from our PDP-11/70, so even with the "hard wire" modem we never
got more than 1800 baud out of them.

Which reminds me of an interesting story.  These modems were only
rated for 1200 baud.  We used them at that speed for several weeks
before I said "why not just turn up the baud rate and see what
happens?" -- one of those questions young teenagers ask because they
don't know any better :-).  So we tried 2400 baud.  Garbage.  We then
tried 1800 baud and they worked flawlessly.  Sweet!  50% bonus just
for being experimental!
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