Vector Macintosh desktop on a Tektronix 4054A vector graphics workstation (4K 50Hz, no audio)
(PHOTOSENSITIVITY ADVISORY: This video contains moments when the display screen being filmed flashes twice — part of the mechanism for clearing the display. Although that’s within W3C guidelines described at https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/press/photosensitive-epilepsy-and-online-content , I thought viewers might want to know this ahead of time.)
The #tektronix 4054A is an unusual graphics #workstation from around 1980: for a start, it’s a 16-bit computer with 64 kilobytes of RAM and a built-in BASIC interpreter. Even more unusual is its screen: a huge 19″ vector storage cathode ray tube, a display device that’s bit like a glowing green Etch-a-Sketch.
Today we put the Tek to work to draw a screenshot from a slightly newer computer, one whose graphics that are both better AND worse. While the 4054A can draw true straight lines instead of staircases of pixels, and while its « resolution » is far finer, the Mac can update its display much more quickly and change on-screen graphics without having to erase the entire screen first. Vector storage tube displays didn’t last very long after 1984: plummeting RAM costs made bitmap graphics cheaper than ever, and today’s computers are much more like the Mac than any of the Tektronix vector machines.
The Macintosh « screenshot » seen here is actually a hand-vectorised version of the Macintosh System 1.0 screenshot found on Wikipedia. After tracing the screenshot image in Inkscape, I converted the resulting vector graphic to a format that a BASIC program running on the 4054A can plot rapidly to the display. A similar conversion process was used to display other vector graphics on the Tek in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yve3CYlR-TQ
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