[rescue] Wanted: VT1xx power switch

[Laurence Brevard]

At 09:35 PM 5/20/2017, Steve Hatle wrote:

  Just at the end of cleaning up a VT180 (minus the disk drives) ...

  --
  The backstory - there was a listing locally for "vintage equipment"
  and I
  spied what looked like a VT100 w/keyboard. I went to pick it up, and
  found it was a VT180, but the owner had no idea if he ever had the
  disk
  drives or any software.

Wow!

Not that I have hardware to contribute to this but it sure brought
back memories from almost 35 years ago.

Shortly after we got married in 1982, my wife, who was and is a CPA,
needed to do a project for a client that involved a business model
in a big spreadsheet.

We rented a VT180 with CP/M installed from... <somewhere>

I remember it as a VT100 terminal with a pair of 5 1/4" disk drives
that sat on top of it. The computer was a card that plugged into
the back of it. [Mentioned by others in this stream.]

The spreadsheet software was called SuperCalc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCalc

The printer was an IBM Selectric that she already owned to which
we added a serial computer interface. NOT the best choice for a
printer! Later we replaced that with some huge dot-matrix printer.

As I recall, the rent was $300 /month.

She billed the client well over $12,000 for that work and we got
our first real proof that a computer for her office would be
cost-effective.

Within a year we had returned the VT180 and purchased an MS-DOS but
non IBM-compatible PC from TI and setup Lotus 123 on it.

She also bought accounting software called "The Boss" (later to
become "System II") and word processing software from "Captain
Crunch" called Easy-Writer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EasyWriter

The weirdest software was a set of programs called: EDIX, SPELLIX,
and WORDIX.

These were a multi-window text editor, a spell checker, and a
formatting program that closely resembled NROFF (which I was
using at the time on a VAX 11/780 under VMS).

That computer and software cost over $10,000 back in 1983. The
CPU was an 8088 at 5 MHz. It had 756 KB RAM, a 10 MB HDD, and
a color display.

Later we added a real IBM PC/XT with similar specs and then
moved on to 286 AT class systems from Compu-Add in Austin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuAdd

I networked the systems using a non-Ethernet LAN technology
from LANtastic to share files and printers and to do backups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantastic

Memories...

Laurence Brevard
Cedar Park, TX
http://brevardandbrevard.com/