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TeleVideo 950


Owner: Tom Stepleton
Location: St. Louis, MO


The chocolate and cream exterior colors remind me of the Teletype terminal for my AT&T 3B2. The owner fills us in:

The tvi950 has to be one of the ugliest machines I've ever seen. It reeks of early-Eighties computing. It has a board date of 1982; other than that I know nothing of it other than what's available on the Internet (read: not much, and www.televideo.com is something completely different). Since there is a dearth of information available, let me recount the mildly amusing story of how I procured it.

Early 1996: a Mac Plus at my high school gets a short on the analog board adjacent to the flyback coil. Magic smoke plumes. The computer is toast.

May, 1996: Mac Plus is sold to me for $10, sans keyboard. I cannabalize it for RAM and 800k drive and take rubbings of "steven jobs" and "Woz". Previously, I remembered that I needed a terminal to free myself from console locks common in Linux SVGAlib programming and recalled that a local furniture store had some terminals sitting as displays. I go the the furniture store, get permission, but run into a problem. They want a keyboard. I end up spending some time filing a phone jack to fit in the Plus, only realized that the cords connectiong the handsets fit perfectly. Oh well. I attach the filed jack to a broken keyboard from my father's workplace, and walk to the store, Mac in arm. After earning odd looks from members of the Gideons handing out Testaments at an intersection, I make the trade. I walk back. It works fine the first time (after configuration). All's well that ends well...


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