Uniscope
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The Uniscope was a Sperry Univac dumb terminal. Several models were produced: the Uniscope 100, Uniscope 200, the UTS 10, the UTS 20, the UTS 30. the UTS 40 and the color UTS 60.
A proprietary communications protocol was common to all member of the Uniscope product line. Groups of terminals were generally dropped off a common communications line and identified by remote identifier and station identifier symbols. Some terminals may have been equipped with peripheral devices such as printers and recording devices which were identified on the communications line by a device identifier. Terminals on a drop were sequentially polled for traffic, sometimes with a general poll to which any terminal with traffic could respond. A fairly complex data presentation protocol permitted application programmers to format a screen for any number of business purposes. For example, fields could be described that would accept only numeric or alpha-numeric characters. Some fields could not be changed by the terminal operator. A protocol extension permitted programmers to specify color for each field.
The color UTS 60 terminal arrived on the market at about the same time as desktop computers with EGA monitors. The general consensus was that the UTS60 was overengineered and overpriced for the emerging market. Eventually emulation software for the Uniscope line running on desktop computers ended manufacturing of the genuine article. Screen size of the original Uniscope 100 was 12 X 80 or 16 x 64 characters. All letters were in capital. Each character was individually drawn as a series of splines using technology developed for displays in military cockpits. Later Uniscopes supported a 24 X 80 screen using raster technology.
[edit] See also
The Uniscopes were Sperry Univac dumb terminal, devices with a keyboard and display to allow a person to interact with a Univac mainfram computer. Several models were produced: the Uniscope 100, Uniscope 200 were hardwired terminals with fixed functionality. The UTS 10, UTS 20, UTS 30, UTS 40 and the color UTS 60 were "intelligent terminals" powered by 8-bit microprocessors, predecessor of todays powerful chips that run today's PCs. The UTS-400-TE was specialized terminal that had a powerful text editing program burned into firmware intended at first to allow for the editing of simple copy such as that for a newspaper, and later adapted as a prototype word processor with 8" floppy disks and driving Letter Quality daisy wheel printers.
A proprietary communications protocol was common to all member of the Uniscope product line. Groups of terminals were generally dropped off a common communications line and identified by remote identifier and station identifier symbols. Some terminals may have been equipped with peripheral devices such as printers and recording devices which were identified on the communications line by a device identifier. Terminals on a drop were sequentially polled for traffic, sometimes with a general poll to which any terminal with traffic could respond. A fairly complex data presentation protocol permitted application programmers to format a screen for any number of business purposes. For example, fields could be described that would accept only numeric or alpha-numeric characters. Some fields could not be changed by the terminal operator. A protocol extension permitted programmers to specify color for each field.
The color UTS 60 terminal arrived on the market at about the same time as desktop computers with EGA monitors. The general consensus was that the UTS60 was overengineered and overpriced for the emerging market. Eventually emulation software for the Uniscope line running on desktop computers ended manufacturing of the genuine article. Screen size of the original Uniscope 100 was 12 X 80 or 16 x 64 characters. All letters were in capital. Each character was individually drawn as a series of splines using technology developed for displays in military cockpits. Later Uniscopes supported a 24 X 80 screen using raster technology.
