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This Odd Dumb Terminal Has A Surprise Inside!

🕑 Added 2021-04-06 02:00:59 +0000 UTC

Comments

Mike O'Dell

My first reaction was “meter bridge” like for a multi-track tape recorder. My German isn’t good enough to read the plump linked document, but it seems like my first reaction is not right, but it’s in the right half-plane. Good find!

Bill Kerr

Posted this on youtube but in case google eats my link here it is again. Schematics and wiring: https://stromrichter.org/showthread.php?tid=3993

MVVblog

Saw this on Ebay, but you win the auction 😄

Hi Fran! Thanks for this video, very strange device. If I had in my hands I would be unable to wait to open it and to try to understand the pinout of the signal in/out DB25 and try to send some data there. I'm able to spend days (and nights!) to try to understand how it works and for what is it for.

NorSob

what comes to my mind is, i think it has something to do with amount.. 0% to 100% of some kind of signal.

nice show fran....cool tech and pretty wiring loom

Michael A Klaene

I think that BobC is on the correct path. It seems to be more of a display device that could monitor any one of 16 event channels. An overlay with the appropriate label would be placed in front of the display.

David Peaker

To me it looks like one of Dr McCoy's diagnosis screens from Star Trek TOS.

Dr Andy Hill

Was the 16bit RS232 RS424? Anyone? This is way back the beginning of my IT career! Ahh Fran, you broke it! I'm tellin on ya!

BobC

I have seen a very similar VFD display in the 1980s that was just a rectangular slab that could be hung on the wall (not a display and base like yours). The intent was to augment many round analog and digital meters in a SCADA system with a "quick glance" display. IIRC, the signal was muxed PWM with discrete address pins to say what data was present on the PWM line, with a clock and an address valid strobe. PWM was used because it played well in both the analog and digital domains. As I saw them used, the displays were for technicians and managers, not operators. Each plant had it's own bus configuration, and there were notebooks containing overlays labeled with the engineering units for each data set that were placed on the front of the display, hiding the default 0-to-100 markings. They disappeared seemingly overnight as the IBM PC took over such mundane duties, and I saw none of them after about 1985.