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  Steve Loughranstevel@hachyderm.io

  Sep 5, 2026, 10:42 PM

  @brouhaha @argv_minus_one i know of the 3270 by way of the 3270 font; never seen one IRL

  I have in my head the idea that the first interactive displays were the cold war radar warning system, whirlwind, some kind of CRT + pen
  Correct?

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  🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑brouhaha@mastodon.social

  Sep 5, 2026, 10:55 PM

  @stevel @argv_minus_one
  Yes. Those weren't really available as a "terminal" for attachment to anything else. They were fundamentally designed as an integral part of SAGE.
  The IBM 2250 was probably heavily influenced by SAGE, which itself had been heavily influenced by Whirlwind.
  There were earlier IBM graphic displays for the 700/7000-series "scientific" computers, but they weren't coupled with keyboards for textual interaction.
  (The 2250 keyboard was optional.)

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  Rich Aldersonalderson@mastodon.sdf.org

  Sep 5, 2026, 11:36 PM

  @stevel @brouhaha @argv_minus_one The SAGE screens were real HtG radar screens.

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  🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑brouhaha@mastodon.social

  Sep 6, 2026, 12:00 AM

  @alderson @stevel @argv_minus_one
  As was the DEC Type 30 on the PDP-1 etc., and the Type 338/339/340 on PDP-8/9/10. The tubes were 16ADP7, with a mix of slow and fast phospors, magnetically deflected. In normal radar use, deflection coils for a single axis would be spun about the neck of the tube by a motor, but for the IBM and DEC displays, there were deflection coils on two fixed orthogonal axes, similar but not identical to a television.

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  ティージェーグレェteajaygrey@snac.bsd.cafe

  Sep 5, 2026, 11:01 PM

  There was WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) GUI collaborative network driven document editing at least as far back as the so-called "Mother of All Demos" in 1968 e.g.
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI
  
  Albeit, the NLS (oNLine System) Engelbart is demonstrating there, was part of IIRC a $250,000 grant given to SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and was not turned into a product nor sold publicly in 1968.
  
  As I learned from John Deneen at "Program for the Future's CoLABoration MashUp 2010" at the Computer History Museum, Doug (Engelbart) was actually terminated from SRI after he presented the Mother of All Demos. JCR Licklider heard about the presentation, and later approached SRI with an offer of (D)ARPA funding and SRI very quietly re-hired Doug. Subsequently, NLS became subsumed into (D)ARPANet.
  
  SRI had cross-licensing agreements with SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and a lot of the things demoed in 1968 and pioneered by Engelbart's team at SRI, later became more widespread thanks in no small part due to PARC's Altos and Star systems which were commercially produced, albeit at a much smaller scale than personal computers.
  
  Ultimately, (D)ARPA funding was cut to Engelbart's group at SRI in the late 1970s (or maybe early 1980s?), when apparently "Lick" (as Doug referred to JCR Licklider) was taken aback by Doug telling him that they had recently hired some women to train folks in how to use NLS at the time.
  
  Apparently JCR Licklider had somehow been imprinted with the erroneous notion that NLS should be using some sort of AI system to train its users? That was a time before the 1980s so-called "AI Winter" and there were insane amounts of investment into what would be: dead ends. Perhaps, not entirely dissimilar to where we find ourselves, again, in 2026?
  
  To paraphrase Doug in an interview he gave with Robert X. Cringely not long before his passing: "It's been a few decades since then. I still have never encountered a computer system which can train its users."
  
  CC: @argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org @stevel@hachyderm.io
  
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