[rescue] Ss 4/5 speed/framebuffers

[Adam Kropelin]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Sandau" <ssandau at bath.tmac.com>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2002 7:24 PM
Subject: Re: [rescue] Ss 4/5 speed/framebuffers

<snip>

> Typesetting machine I had cost me $2000 to add 256K memory to it! No
> HDD. Had to reboot the machine to a special program just to copy
> floppies and such. I actually miss that. Varityper was the company.
> First one I had was electro-mechanical, second one was digital. The
> digital one was a $40,000 unit new. Bought it for $250. Sold it for
> scrap. (I'm sorry!) Strange turns in life sometimes.

Varityper!

Man, *that* brings back some memories...

Near the end of my senior year in high school the vo-tech wing received a pile
of additional funding and went about upgrading their equipment. One item they
replaced was a rather large digital Varityper. I ran across it one day in the
hall with "trash" signs hanging off it. Luckily my dad had let me borrow his
pickup truck to drive to school that day and I managed to talk a friend and some
of the maintenance guys into helping me load it. (Note to any current HS
students: One of the best things I did in HS was to make friends with the
maintenance guys. They got me all sorts of junk headed for the dumpster and even
loaned me tools sometimes. I highly recommend getting to know your maintenance
and buildings & grounds crews. They'll like meeting a student who doesn't treat
them like dirt and you'll have a mutually beneficial relationship.)

The Varityper consisted, as I recall, of two large cabinets (approx 5' cubes on
wheels with countertops) connected by a hard-wired umbilical cord. There were
also several large terminals (looked like overgrown TRS-80 model II/IIs). In
order to fit everything in the truck I had to cut the 50+ conductor umbilical
cord. It had 8 in. floppy drives I think as well as the heaviest/strongest
keyboard I've ever seen. Some people consider Sun type 3 keyboards to be built
like tanks but those are nothing compared to the Varityper's.

I hauled it all home and my dad was kind enough to help me unload it and let me
store it in a corner of his barn. I soldered the umbilical cord back together
and fired it up at one point but didn't have any software for it. I eventually
disassembled it and used it for parts (tons of Z80 CPUs, RAM, and TTL logic
chips). In fact, some pieces of it are still in my junk box.

--Adam