Case-sensitivity: why -- or why not? (was Re: Damnation!)

[François Pinard]

Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed at ix.netcom.com> écrit:

> > If you mean those oscilloscopes which simultaneously drove the X and Y
> > coordinates, with separate analogic hardware for each character, the only
> > one I knew were the CDC 6x00 consoles, and these were pretty expensive

> Hmmm, my first thought would have been Tektronix storage display
> tubes...

Yes, of course.  Tektronix were also vector drawing, characters included.
Those were not cheap, but in no way as expensive as the CDC 6x00 consoles.

> The infamous "killer" displays (hearsay, but I've heard that
> the vacuum in a cracked display tube was sufficient to drive the gun
> end out the front of the tube to impale the user <G>)

Surely, the glass of the bigger Tektronix memory displays was getting
dangerously hot, we could not touch them, and people were joking about
baking eggs on them :-).

The CDC 6x00 consoles were no memory display, they ought to be refreshed
by continuously redisplaying their whole contents, and one of the eleven
computers making up the machine was dedicated to that sole clever task.
Since then, I've _never_ seen anything like these (not even approaching)
for "feeling" in real time how an operating system behaves inside.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard