Terak Museum

Summary

THE TERAK MUSEUM IN THE SOUTH WING OF THE JEFFERSON COMPUTER MUSEUM TERAK MUSEUM - UCSD PASCAL MUSEUM - USUS LIBRARY ANCIENT ALPHABETIC ART - LIBRARY - ALTAIR AND IMSAI EMULATORS REVIVING CASSETTE DATA - DISK UTILITIES - COMPUTER RESCUE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE What is a Terak? It is an early personal computer made by the Terak Corporation of Scottsdale, Arizona. It was sold from about 1979 until 1985. One of the first models was the Terak 8510/a shown above. It was based on the popular PDP-11/03 processor, a 16-bit CPU. The Terak 8510 could have as much as 128K of RAM with the PDP-11/23 option. For storage, it has big eight-inch floppy drives that go klunk-klunk, in IBM 3740 format, holding roughly 256K, 512K or 1 meg each. Hard disks of five to forty megs were available. The Terak featured both RS-232 and 20 milliamp current loop serial connections, so you could connect to the printers and teletypes of the time. The keyboard included a numeric keypad and arrow keys arranged in a vertical column. The Terak was popular for teaching Pascal to college kids. As such, all the oldsters who were in college then and used this computer have a great affection for it, meaning they can no longer remember how slow they were. The Terak was advertised as a "Graphic Computer System." The monochrome display could show a mixture of text and graphics. The screen was divided into three sections (each 80 dots high) and each section could be independently set to either text, graphics, or both. Text was at 640 x 240 and memory-mapped graphics were at 320 x 240. While compiling your UCSD Pascal program, the Terak adjusted the video display so that as the compile and link progressed, you could watch the compiler's memory usage bit-for-bit, watching the stack move toward the heap. Text was memory-mapped within the PDP-11's IO space. Each line of 80 characters was represented by 80 bytes. There were 25 lines but only 24 could be shown. The display could be scrolled by setting the start...