A vector graphics workstation from the 70s

Summary

This repair has been on the to do list for ages, so let’s finally get to it! In my mind, Tektronix is a brand that makes electronics lab equipment like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. Turns out, they made quite a few terminals and a couple of computers! A good friend saw this one for sale local to him, and I poked him till he agreed on picking it up for me. Picking it up may be the wrong wording, this thing is big and heavy! It weights about 35kg and it’s nearly a meter long! So let’s have a look at what this is, what I needed to do to repair it and what it can do! Some history The machine I got is a Tektronix 4051 graphics workstation, released in 1975, but let’s look a bit at the history from Tektronix before this was released. Tektronix started in late 1945 as Tekrad, but quickly got renamed to Tektronix. One of their first products was the 511 oscilloscope, the first oscilloscope with a trigger! This turned out to be a good thing, and soon enough, Tektronix was synonymous with oscilloscopes and known as a company that made some of the best test and measurement equipment. In the 60s, mainframe and then minicomputers became more popular, which often needed a terminal. Tektronix at this point was making storage oscilloscopes, which use a storage CRT tube that can “remember” drawn signals. Using this technology, Tektronix released their first terminal in 1969, the 4002. A 11″ terminal that was capable of displaying graphics with a 400×300 pixel resolution. As the CRT rememebers the drawn data, there was no need for a RAM framebuffer! A few years later in 1971 they released the 4010, again 11″ but now with 1024*780 pixel resolution. As they used Storage CRTs, these terminals where a lot cheaper then the competitors. Mind you, cheap still means around $4000, or around $30.000 in 2025 money. But the IBM 2250 was priced at around $280.000 That’s 1970s dollars, so well over 2 million USD today! Before we move away from these terminals, one last cool tidbit. Tektronix ...