Tektronix 4010- 4014 Graphics 3D Vintage Computer

Tektronix 4010- 4014 Graphics 3D Vintage Computer
more here : computergraphmuseum.free.fr
© Copyright Computer Graphics Museum
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[@rodrigobraz2]

As a child of the 70s and teen programmer of the 80s, it is inspiring to code now with this in the background. It reconnects me to the fascination and joy programming provided back then.

[@PixelOutlaw]

Love that hopeful retro futuristic style music. Captures a different era in computing, an era that gave people imagination and pioneered new visuals.

[@xWindowsXP]

PixelOutlaw hell yeah, it ties the visuals together

[@orbitaloutcast9878]

If only they knew.

[@belstar1128]

Reminds me of watching old movies as a kid.

[@djmips]

This style of drawing onto a 'storage tube' by a rather slow process; almost like printing to a printer; is very cool to see. I feel like this type of display inspired the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV show's depiction of the Guide's computer animated sequences.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

They would have been done on “calligraphic” (steered-beam) displays.

[@paulocarvalho7877]

That's still what happens today (although much faster), but the rendered results are stored in what is termed the frame buffer memory in your graphics hardware.

[@tekmec1]

I remember these 4010 through 4014 computer terminals, dubbed "dumb" terminals back then, since, in order to use them, they had to be plugged into a main frame computer. I ended up in the 4010 department in September of '75, calibrating these instruments. I had been sent there because the Tek 31 calculator was not selling up to expectations and that department moved all but one tech to other departments to keep from laying us off.

[@analogsynthmuseum784]

nice memories thanks.

[@uwefrotscher9039]

It's really very interesting. I love these old machines. How was this animation written? in Basic? I recreated some animations from the film "Alien 1979" in Firweorks, Flash and Cinema 4D. I would like to write such animations with Basic - unfortunately I don't have the knowledge, I've been out of Basic for too long.

[@eddievhfan1984]

@@uwefrotscher9039 Someone just pointed out in a recent comment that the drawing routines being demonstrated were a FORTRAN library, so presumably, this was all derived from that language. However, since the displays are driven by dumb-terminal control characters, you could theoretically use any language that can generate them.

[@vitalyl1327]

You could even have shades of green there - brightness faded over time, so if you're patient enough you could draw first the darkest parts, then more bright, then more - every time waiting 10-20 min in between, and after an hour or so you'll have an image with a few different shades of green.

[@stral_]

Music 0:17 Alfaluna - La Conquista Dello Spazio 3:50 Alfaluna - Leggende Di Altri Mondi 6:55 Alfaluna - Odissea Stellare

[@apa3plus]

thanks for this helpful comment :)

[@Duvmasta]

Big Thanks!

[@davidfbenko]

Thank you!!!

[@davidfbenko]

Does anyone know what music the fanfare at the beginning is? Thank you.

[@srdyns]

Hi! Do you know where I can find this music? thanks!

[@CZghost]

Kind of reminds me the vintage sci-fi movies from 70's and 80's :)

[@glynnwright1699]

Ramtek produced a simulator that generated images on a raster scan device from 4014 commands. It was a mammoth task because they even had to simulate the bugs in the 4014 code. It was way cheaper than 4014, though.

[@darylcheshire1618]

saw a few of these in the ‘70s on open days of colleges and universities. I’d love to see an emulator of the storage tube. Imagine if you could plot Excel graphs in a simulated Tectronics 4014 display. There are games controller emulators and you can select real time or normal 2022 speed.

[@belstar1128]

I love this video and the music reminds me of old movies i watched as a kid.

[@KanalFrump]

computers back then were so much more tangible. Slow enough so you could see the operations happening. The operating systems very simple and only thinly abstracting the physical hardware. The programs you wrote did exactly what you wanted them to, nothing more and nothing less. Nobody else's code would be executing on a single-user computer. No cloud nonsense. No spyware. No telemetry and forced updates causing sudden unwanted system reboots.

[@nonix14]

Wow, Disspla! I used this some 30 years ago on a Sperry Univac OS1100 mainframe . Those were the days! Thanks for the memories!

[@Omega9935]

Rainer Burkhardt that means 1990, this seems 70s.

[@cockatoofan]

@@Omega9935 plenty of places used ancient equipment for as long as it lasted You could still use terminals in libraries in late 90s/early 2000s

[@pcjabber]

Old tech is amazing. Music was great; thanks for the upload!

[@uzimonkey]

Wow, I never even knew what a storage tube was until now. What a cool display technology, vector displays without the flicker and as much complexity as you want.

[@xunk16]

Except movement... This thing doesn't appear to be able to "spin" a picture. It would have to redraw it from scratch each time!

[@jvburnes]

@@xunk16 I used Tek 4010, 4012 and 4014s to do early 3D graphics research in college in 1982. You could do both static graphics (as in this video) as well as moving graphics. This was controlled through what Tektronix called "write through" voltage. If you drew graphics above a certain voltage it would be stored statically on the display (literally it used electrostatic storage almost like an Etch-A-Sketch :). The problem with movement was two fold (a) you had to keep sending the lines to the display at the communications speed of the terminal which was maybe 19.2 k bits/second at best back then. Too slow or too many lines and they started to fade out. (b) Since they were written below the write-through voltage they were dim. So the motion capability was limited to small motion previews. The Atari computer games of the time didn't use storage scopes, they used normal CRT / Televisions and continuously refreshed the lines directly from a main memory 'display list' 30 times a second. Fantastic for games, but they could only move the display beam so fast so had a limited number of lines they could display at once. That's why on really complex games like Space War, Asteroids or Tempest you started to get flicker as it approached the maximum number of lines. Fun stuff. Wish I would have had more time, but I was too overload with Calc and Physics finals to finish anything really creative. If I'd been born in LA I could have worked on the original Tron.

[@xunk16]

@@jvburnes Thanks! That was very informative. How many frame per seconds would you say the static remnant led you do?

[@jvburnes]

@@xunk16 I not quite sure what you're asking, but static display didn't have "frames per second". It was static until you cleared the screen. In dynamic mode, it was a function of the communications speed of the terminal (19.2k up to 115,200) if it was hardwired directly to the computer and the number lines in the object you're moving. My memory at the time on my system was something like, you could refresh a cube or cursor. Maybe a simple object like a childs wagon at a useful refresh rate, but it was really limited.

[@pigpenpete]

@@xunk16 Well this video has 12 images in nearly 10 minutes, so 0.02fps?

[@UrFaceLand]

Reading Neuromancer right now, thanks for the retro cyberpunk vibes

[@sa3270]

It looks very strange, like some sort of weird analog frame buffer. It would be interesting to learn more about this.

[@Schimnesthai]

I came here from CGR, sad that their computer doesn't work at all, but it's really nice to know something "new".

[@BenInSeattle]

With all the "DISSPLA" self-hype, I expected a 1980s pirate/demoscene scroller to appear saying, *"GREETZ* *FROM* *DISSPLA* *2* *ALL* *ELEET* *D00DZ!"*

[@ichtreffnixtv8605]

Watching this is extremly statisfying

[@thedungeondelver]

this just makes me happy to listen to, and to watch

[@collj86]

The problem with the 4010 and to a lesser extent it’s cousin the 4014 was the refresh rates were tied directly in to the bus clock rates. This can be seen in various set ups as smearing or what we used to call granny pantie syndrome. IBM had a established the frame rates based on an older clock rate standard. The clock speeds could be programmed but to get to the registers on the bus, one had to do a memory dump establish the hexadecimal frame rate convert that to a binary number and then and only then would the monitor display a proper refresh rate. I remember Tim wattly my supervisor throwing a cup of coffee right at the wall when the display would smear lol But albeit with slow refresh rates the 4010 cpu with its new architecture more than made up for the monitors shortcomings For anyone interested I’m a vintage computer expert. I’ll school anyone that’s interested

[@BenHelweg]

Seriously cool.

[@ryanyoder7573]

They should have played this at raves back in the day

[@uwefrotscher9039]

That was still graphics and animation, always nice to see something like that. More of that! I assume that was programmed in Basic ??

[@giacjack]

wondeful, so...futuristic

[@karmaduq]

Thank you thank you

[@MyAows]

best old times

[@douro20]

I believe the music was composed expressly for this video.

[@davidfbenko]

douro20 belated thanks. That's high production value music for a cgi advert. I'm sure I've heard both pieces elsewhere.

[@stral_]

Check out my new comment for the music

[@jmalsam]

Needs moar Weather War. j/k Thanks for the nostalgia!

[@mastersoftoday]

yet another comment about how good the music is

[@kellybrower301]

San Diego!

[@davidfbenko]

Hello! Great video. Please could you tell us the name of the 2 pieces of music used in this video? Thank you!

[@Betwazzled]

How were these graphics made back in the day?

[@k1m198]

So Disspla is Skynet....

[@jasongomez5344]

So this was a vector display? And it is deliberately drawing the vectors slower than usual or normal speed? I remember playing the Asteroids and Star Wars arcade machines in the early '80s and they had vector graphics.

[@analogsynthmuseum784]

yes and i continu to play those game with mame emulator !!!

[@eddievhfan1984]

Part of the relatively slow drawing speed was down to two things- 1. The 4010 series was designed to be run off of inexpensive serial communications links (as opposed to some of the more sophisticated and expensive interconnect systems used by firms like IBM), so these images are being drawn at speeds like 2400 baud, or 2.4 kbit/s (since this is a 1-bit serial connection). The terminal draw commands were all sent in the same way one might send data to a smart terminal, as control characters. 2. Although technically not applicable as a vector graphics terminal, the 4014, for example, had 1024 x 1024 addressable points on the screen, with 800 vertical points visible. (A possible explanation for 1024 x 768 as a standard graphics resolution, maybe?) That equates to over a million drawing points, which explains the detail on the screens compared to an Atari Quadrascan arcade monitor, for example, and it takes a lot more time to draw all those lines. 3. These terminals utilized a so-called storage tube display, which means that as the image was being drawn on the CRT, it was utilizing a self-scanning and redrawing feature to literally store the drawn graphics on the tube surface itself, thereby eliminating the need for a framebuffer of then-expensive solid-state memory in the terminal. (The brighter trace of the screen initially drawing something is a result of the higher strength beam used to initially draw to the screen) The slower draw speed can potentially also be explained by the need to retrace the image on screen dictating how far the display can draw until it needs to be interrupted to do its re-draw cycle. It also made the terminal practically impossible to use for moving images, as you had to blank the whole screen to redraw an already existing component, especially with no framebuffer.

[@jasongomez5344]

@@eddievhfan1984 Thanks, very interesting. You must have had to spend a lot of time waiting for your drawings to be plotted onto the screen in this way. Truly pioneering stuff. I thought I was pretty early with graphics with my Commodore Amiga in the late '80s.

[@eddievhfan1984]

@@jasongomez5344 Also, after double checking my research, I am somewhat in error--while the 4010 had an effective 1024x800 resolution, the 4014 was 4K. (Not even joking, it had approximately 4K x 3K addressable points!)

[@pjaro77]

Wasn't the alien 1979 film muthur computer interface made with this Tektronix computer ?

[@justasgidziunas4476]

This style of graphics really fascinates me and i was wondering does anyone know what software could be used to create things like this?

[@austinvw1988]

I'm not an expert but it reminds me of a Oscilloscope? If the consents the same the here's this asdfg.me/osci/

[@perplexedmoth]

It's vector graphics, so, any vector based image editor will do. Rendering it animated like the way a Tektronix does can be done with a simple shader code (any shader programmer you can find can do this). I think Tektronix 4010 processes x,y coordinates at a maximum baud rate of 9600, meaning 300 coordinates per second. As for how the images are created, they are mostly output of programs, and sometimes hand-drawn using Tektronix tubes.

[@BenInSeattle]

You'll need real Tek hardware to make it look as nifty as this, but there are emulators. *DISSPLA* is the software that created this and it is still available, but I believe it requires programming in FORTRAN which might be a bit of a barrier. However, any software that can output the TEK4010 protocol would work. For example, I believe you can use *GNUplot* with the command _set_ _term_ _tek40xx_ to convert a dataset (like 3-D coordinates) into a Tektronix vector plot.

[@jvburnes]

Any graphics software, mostly custom, numerical display or commercial CAD systems of the time could send the proper information to these terminals to display graphics. There are special ASCII "control character" sequences you sent to the terminal to enter line drawing mode or draw a line, clear the display etc. I wrote a vector based 3D animation system back in 81 / 82 that did just that on a Data General Eclipse S/230 minicomputer. I was incredibly close to what MAGI And Abel and Associates were doing on PDP 11/60s onTRON except they were drawing on 70mm film instead of a storage tube.

[@jvburnes]

@@austinvw1988 Its the same technology. Electrostatic storage tubes allowed you to display anything you wanted .. a bit like a very fast and high resolution etch-a-sketch. If you drew lines above a certain voltage they would be stored on the tube surface electrostatically until you cleared the tube by sending a clearing signal. If you drew lines under this voltage, the drawing would be dynamic. If you drew them fast enough they would be animated like on an oscilloscope. Even today I keep a tube-based Tektronix oscillscope for this unique capability. They have voltage inputs which can be used in sweep mode to display signals. In XY mode you can drive their XY inputs directly to play vector games.

[@joncarter2287]

How does it know when plotting sin x / x not to draw in front of things? It doesn't have the memory for a z buffer, it can't be raycasting and checking for occlusion, how does it do it?????

[@eddievhfan1984]

The controlling mainframe computer is doing the occlusion calculations. It's essentially a dumb terminal hooked up to a storage tube vector display, so it only draws what the mainframe tells it to via relayed terminal commands.

[@BenInSeattle]

Kyle is correct. That's why this video keeps advertising *DISSPLA* which is the package of FORTRAN routines that can handle nifty things like eliminating vectors that should be hidden and drawing only within a shape.

[@DragonsAndDragons777]

But can it run Doom?

[@konakzizu]

when computers were COPMUTERS

[@thenobslol]

they're the same now as they were in the past just a billion times better, affordable and complex than ever

[@KC9UDX]

@@thenobslol better in some ways, worse in others.

[@richardhead8264]

_In what way did they silence the police?_

[@parthomukherjee4641]

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