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...
Back to the Museum!