Tektronix 4015 interface

[rwing27]

Does anyone have a solution to interface with this archaic computer monitor peripheral?  I'm guessing somewhere back in LV 3 or so there might be something? I am trying to create a vi representation of its output to replace a poorly written c code, whose source files i do not have.  Thanks in advance.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Does anyone have a solution to interface with this archaic computer monitor peripheral?  I'm guessing somewhere back in LV 3 or so there might be something? I am trying to create a vi representation of its output to replace a poorly written c code, whose source files i do not have.  Thanks in advance.

 

That display is really a computer terminal. It was released in 1974, about 12 years before LabVIEW  1.0 was even invented/released. So I would guess that even LabVIEW 3.0 is very unlikely to have ever had any specific library for this thing. What are you trying to do there? Reading the display contents over the RS-232 optional interface or something?

 

It probably would involve knowing exactly which type of interface you have installed in that thing and then using the according protocol. In this catalog on page 273 you can see that the interface was option selectable for many popular computers of that time, each of them with their own specific terminal data protocol. That was before DECs VT100 terminal set some sort of defacto terminal protocol standard. It might be nowadays pretty hard to come to some protocol definitions of some of those interfaces.

 

Interesting to see that this thing cost almost 9000$ at its introduction excluding any interface options.

[ensegre]

Back when I was doing my master thesis, we had a mainframe connected with a bunch of serial cables to a number of DEC VT220? (vt100 on steroids), a couple of VT240? (ditto plus tektronix 4015/6? emulation) and a couple of Mac SE/classic/II with a serial terminal emulator whose name I forgot, around the offices. Working involved programming in fortran, compile on VMS crosslinking with an NCARplot library, run the executable which generated a graphics metafile, launch a certain metafile viewer, switch manually the VT240 to tektronix mode, and see the graphics build up vector by vector as the data was sent in on the serial line.  I don't even remember which monitor had color at all, probably only the boss' MacII+. IIRC, the mac emulator was even a bit more sophisticated because it could swap vt100/tek mode by means of some escape sequence, imagine the results of noise on the serial line.

So yes, by means of VISA writes Labview may cause a tektronix terminal to display some nice graphics, but is that what is asked?

http://vt100.net/tektronix/4014-um/4014-um.pdf for instance contains reference to the graphic commands. As per wikipedia, xterm -t still supports tek emulation.