When I started at NCR in 1988, my department (which was word rather than number intensive) had one of I think four in the world Convergent Systems "Worksaver" networked word processing systems.? There was a mainframe unit that provided shared file storage and a couple of back-end applications.
The server connected to 4 strings of up to 16 workstations which were 80186 or 80286 systems with floppy and sometimes small hard drives.?
This is related to the thread because I am pretty sure that network was GPIB, with fat multiconductor cables and daisychained connectors on each string of workstations.? At the time I wasn't familiar with instrument communications, so it didn't ring any bells with me.
The Worksavers were great word processors, with high resolution monochrome screens that could display attributes like bold, underscore, and italics.? It took a long time for PC word processors to become so nice to use.
John
The Commodore PET series of computers used IEEE-488 to connect to their disk drives and printers. A lot of them were used to control test equipment, sice they were affordable, and could be controlled by the built in CBM BASIC. I had a nice collection of those systems, but I lost most of the hardware during a move.
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 10:39 PM Bill Higdon via Groups.Io <willard561=
[email protected]> wrote:
Also available on the HP Mini's & some of the HP 982x "calculators" before the micro computers came along
