On one of our Convergent Technologies AWS Turbo machines, we successfully dumped the hard drive, and found this text, which seemed to be of some significance to the company. I repost it here for posterity and historical preservation. Note that the letter has some typos (auto-correct is flagging the errors for me as I create this post!). I have decided to keep all of them included, uncorrected, to preserve the originality of the text as we found it on the hard drive.
This letter appears to be a draft of a public notification or announcement, and therefore, it seems appropriate to publish it here, publicly visible, likely 40+ years after it was written.
The machine does not appear to be used by Convergent Technologies directly, but rather by a customer, so the presence of this letter is something of an enigma. Enjoy!
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UNAME
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
by Bert Latamore
CONVERGENT TECHOLOGIES, Inc.
Implements New Design Concepts
Designers have been trying since the mid-40's to consolidate in a single computer the boradest range of data processing capabilities. Only recently, with the advent of very inexpensive, small electronic parts (or microprocessors) have these attempts begun to become reality in the form of the standalone, desktop computer. Until now, however, even these units were characterized by the disadvantages of slow speed data handling and limited data storage capacity.
Now a fairly new firm, CONVERGENT TECHOLOGIES, Inc., Santa Clara, CA., is challenging the minicomputer market with a new approach that distributes the computer power among many work stations while connecting all units through an electronic network system that makes them into a single machine. The result -- a system that grows with the owner's needs from the size of single minicomputer to that of a minicomputer network. And the system's cost is less than equivalent machines from competitive companies
The secret to
CONVERGENT TECHNOLOGIES' machine is not a new technology. Rather, as the firm's name suggests, it is the more effective and innovative combination of existing technologies, all of which are available in other machines but which have not previously been combined.
The computer is housed in modular units which can be combined in several ways to create each desktop work station. The visual display module, for instance, features a 15-inch, high-resolution, green-tinted screen that you can be tilted up and down and rotated up to 60 degrees from far left to far right. The display can be split into any number of windows, each of which can have its own cursor, to accommodate an entire document or several different data displays at the same time. Displays can be scrolled up and down or left and right. Multiple displays can be scrolled independently of each other. Single characters or groups of characters can be made to stand out in several ways including underlining, reverse video to give dark on light, intensifying and blinking.
The system has been designed to be friendly and flexible, allowing each user to configure it as needed. Because of this flexibility, basic tasks are accomplished wherever possible by using easily modified programs instead of unchangeable hardware.
The keyboard is physically seperate from the rest of the computer to allow different users to adjust the distances between eye, keyboard, and screen for individual comfort. The keyboard design puts keys in clusters of logical groups, including a standard typewritter character board, a 14-key numeric pad, and eight-key status contrtol pad, a six-key cursor control pad, and a 10-key function group that is user definable. Because all key functions are defined by program instructions rather than being built into the hardware, the entire key encoding arrangement can be altered easily by the user to customize his keyboard.
Each displayable character is built in a 10-by-15 pixel cell. The standard character set contains 256 characters. Unlike almost all computers, which store their character sets in Read Only Memory, Convergent's character set is stored in a high-speed memory on the video board. The character set may be easily changed under program control by loading another set from a disk file. This way the number of characters that may be used in the same application program is virtually limitless.
The machine has a 16-bit processor and can hold up to one million characters of information in its usable memory, giving it capabilities closer to those of a large minicomputer than to most desktop microcomputers.
Permanaent disk memory expansion units are also available
Even the basic computer -- the black box that does the processing --has been redesigned to meet human needs. Instead of the standard box-shaped configuration, it is located behind a tilted board that stands to the right of the display screen and looks like a lectern. It's built-in copy clips hold documents being entered into the machine in the same visual plane as the video display, so as to eliminate constant refocusing and thus reduce eye fatigue.
@I @
Courier 72
9.12
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This letter was found on AWS Turbo model 200/266, Serial # A-17618 on a Computer Memories CM5616 hard drive (6 heads, 256 cylinders)
