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I'm thinking about putting together a Terak Web page, and I'm
building up a list of people interested in this old machine.
As I understand it, in the late 70s a flow cytometry instrumentation
company used Teraks as the driving computer for their system, and
that some of you on this mailing list might be able to help me
in my quest... If you have any info, software or hardware that
you could contribute, I'll gladly pay shipping costs, minimal
purchase costs, or swap for something nifty from Wisconsin.
Please respond in private e-mail, I am not a regular subscriber to
this cytometry mailing list, and I won't mail to it again.
It was based on the PDP-11 chipset, built around 1979 by the Terak
company located in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is recognized as one of
the earliest personal computer / workstations with a purely bitmapped
display.
I have a working Terak 8510/C obtained from the surplus sales at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I'd love to find a color model.
I've also got lots of software, manuals, and even some newsletters
from the old Terak user group "TUGBOAT".
As part of this project, I'd like to research and secure the rights
to redistribute software to keep the Teraks alive, as well as collect
and archive freely distributable software. So far, in discussions
with UCSD, this may be possible.
Also, it would be good to have a central list of spare parts and
extra machines for people who'd like to expand their collections, and
to record a list of willing buyers to prevent machines from being
dumped unmercifully. This would be a non-profit venture.
I'd also like to collect textual and bitmap recollections of the
Terak computers, if you have pleasant memories of these machines.
I once wrote a program for the Teraks that would read disk images and
send them out the serial port, along with companion C programs for
other platforms that would list directories and split out the files
in these disk images. This will be on the site.
If any of you would like to help with links, historical references
and stories, old software or hardware, old sales literature,
archives, names of other Terak people and ex-Terak company people,
etc. please pass them along to me in private e-mail.
I've already heard from the nephew of the man who founded Terak.
I plan to scan some of the more interesting material as well as move
some original Terak mono bitmap images to more modern formats.
As for the site URL, it's yet to be determined, although I don't
think that 'terak.com' has been taken yet.
- John Foust
Syndesis Corporation
235 South Main Street
Jefferson, WI 53549 USA
(414) 674-5200
(414) 674-6363 FAX
syndesis@inc.net
http://www.webmaster.com/syndesis/
SIGGRAPH 96 Booth 2334
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