@Cadbury_Moose @sdarlington @BashStKid @cstross

These were not an Ethernet thing, though.

They had 4 or 8 RS232 ports on one side, and a single cable connection on the other to a specialized I/O expansion board that needed just one IRQ to the CPU, with a specialized device driver (or an entire custom version of the operating system) to mux/de-mux the data stream.

#ComputerTerminals #mainframes #minicomputers

@Cadbury_Moose

That reminds me of a piece of kit that Wikipedia famously did not tell people about for 20 years, and only has a sentence about, even now: terminal concentrators.

@sdarlington @BashStKid @cstross

#ComputerTerminals #mainframes #minicomputers #Wikipedia