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What was the resolution of a Tektronix 4051?

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NivagSwerdna:
I'm currently bathed in nostalgia as a pair of Tektronix 4051s just sold on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/354539833673
I was outbid by > £2K so I guess I'll never own the real thing... anyway...  (I played with these back in the day)

this got me thinking... I presume that the X and Y is controlled by a pair of DACs... what was the resolution of those DACs?  i.e. is it actually perfectly possible to emulate those on a raster screen now or did they actually have very high resolution even compared to today's standards?

Just interested!

NivagSwerdna:




Looking at the schematics it looks like X and Y DACs are 10bit?  Slightly confused by the character generator part... maybe that can increase the resolution?

Stray Electron:
  I owned one of these and a 4052 back in the day.  I don't remember the resolution but it was good compared to other small computers of it's day. And the display in the 4051 used vector graphics and not an X-Y display.  I gave mine to a friend of mine along with all the manuals, disk drives, SW etc and he may still have it. If anyone gets seriously interested in these, contact me and I'll try to put you in contact with him.  I doubt that he's interested in selling it but if you need help with one he should be able to help. The last that I heard, he had it in storage in north Florida. Sorry I can't help with the specs other than the 4150 used a 6800 CPU and had IIRC 16k of memory and ran BASIC and had 4 external 8" floppy drives.  I used mine a bit but never got into it's internals.

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: NivagSwerdna on February 06, 2023, 11:06:09 am ---I'm currently bathed in nostalgia as a pair of Tektronix 4051s just sold on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/354539833673
I was outbid by > £2K so I guess I'll never own the real thing... anyway...  (I played with these back in the day)

this got me thinking... I presume that the X and Y is controlled by a pair of DACs... what was the resolution of those DACs?  i.e. is it actually perfectly possible to emulate those on a raster screen now or did they actually have very high resolution even compared to today's standards?

Just interested!

--- End quote ---

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/4051 indicates "logical coordinates are 1024 by 1024 of which the physical screen displays 1024 by 780".

I used one briefly c1976; all I can remember is the display looking better than glass TTYs of the time, and the fun of not erasing the screen.

NivagSwerdna:
FWIW They occur in movies of the period and battlestar galactica etc since they don't suffer from screen raster flicking issues.

http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computer.html?c=298

They seem very collectable currently.  @StrayElectron you might have something of value there!

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