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...
Remember, if you have an interesting story about any
computer in the Museum, let me know!