Hacker News Reader

Comment by muziq | Hacker News Reader

“Fibre optic interface to monitor” ? I want to believe this is real, but it does seem like it’s from some parallel dimension.. All of it is plausible, I guess, just all of it together seems pretty far fetched..

View on HN

The monitor and the main unit were supposed to be in different rooms.

In the 1980's sending several megaHerz signals over long copper wire was too difficult. So optic fibre was used. In those days Ethernet using thick coax cable was limited to 3MHz.

TI Explorer used it as standard, but similar option was available for Symbolics machines in place of IIRC BNC.

Both were used to put consoles (display, mouse, keyboard) in the office while the possibly much louder central units and any attending extra gear would be placed in a dedicated computer room.

Made more sense when you consider things like TI Explorer having optional DSP coprocessor card which might be paired with various RF hardware for realtime processing.

The actual machine was loud, hot, and used lots of electricity. It made sense to put the computer in an air conditioned room (along with its equally large and power-hungry disk drives) and use a long interconnect to place the console somewhere more conducive to humans getting work done. The CADR and the LMI Lambda did this with long copper cables, the Explorer and Symbolics (post-LM2) used fiber.

There was room full of them at UMass in the late 80s, and a huge bundle of fiber than ran down the hall to the lab that used them.

And, there was a parts spare that I used when I took AI :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com