Re: Beehives...

[Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>]

The Beehives were made locally.  A few of my Evans & Sutherland
cronies were apparently working for them at one time. :)

I remember the two kinds we had in Willard Hall: Beehives and
Superbees.  The Beehives had a detachable keyboard and were preferred
because you could put the keyboard on your lap (and your feet on the
desk).  The superbees had an integrated keyboard, I think.  I remember
that they would have problems in 203 Willard because the room was
never properly air conditioned and it would get to 80+ degrees in the
summer.  The characters on the screen would start twinkling like stars
(i.e. randomly changing as the display memories overheated).

A few more beehive quirks: as the screen scrolled up, new lines
scrolling in from the bottom would have a strange dot character placed
on them, which was different from what would be displayed when the
screen was cleared.  Many of us found these strings of dots annoying
and developed a quick habit of pressing OFFLINE/CLEAR/ONLINE in rapid
succession.  This cleared the screen and moved your cursor to the top
of the screen.

As far as their escape sequences went, they didn't follow ANY sort of
standard at all.  In fact, they didn't even preface the cursor
movement codes with the ESC character at all.  They used funky control
characters as part of their escape sequence.  I think this is
reflected in the UNIX termcap entries for the superbees/beehives.
--
                                               Rich Thomson
                                               rthomson@ptc.com