UNIXPC trivia

[Chris Calabrese[mav]]

todd at ivucsb.sba.ca.us (Todd Day) writes:
% lenny at icus.ICUS.COM (Lenny Tropiano) writes:
% [stuff about floppy disk drive deleted...]
% 
% %Well I forget the model, but AT&T had a telephone, computer terminal pair
% %(was it the 510?) that looked like a minature PC7300, with a builtin-phone.
% %They (CT) even had a version of "TAM" called "Touch TAM", that would 
% %convert the touching of the screen on that machine to TAM-equivalent
% %escape codes.  Imagine that, touching the "Filecabinet" to open it up, and
% %then touching the "file" to edit that ...  Reminds me of the days of
% %light-pens! ;-)
% 
% Yep, I'm pretty sure it was the 510.  I don't believe it had a keyboard,
% though, only a telephone touchpad.  I have some interesting stories about
% that (see next couple articles).  One of the options on the touch screen
% was to bring up a picture of a keyboard so you could use that for data
% entry.  The reason you don't see these machines in surplus land is that
% most of them ended up in AT&T internal (including a large chunk of the
% UNIXPC inventory).  I actually did see ONE of these guys hooked up to
% a UNIXPC, with the UA running.  Come to think of it, there MUST have been
% some kind of external keyboard interface...

The keyboard was an optional accessory for the 510.  I think they came
bundled if you ordered the 510a.

They're _real_ popular as gee-whiz phones around AT&T.  The surplus
was probably used up a long time ago.

We're, getting ISDN phones that you can control from an RS232 port
soon, which ought to be even better (a phone controlled from windows
on my Sun perhaps?)
Name:			Christopher J. Calabrese
Brain loaned to:	AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
att!ulysses!cjc		cjc at ulysses.att.com
Obligatory Quote:	``pher - gr. vb. to schlep.  phospher - to schlep light.philosopher - to schlep thoughts.''