Tag Archives: tools

Cefucom 21 is an educational, electro-mechanical multimedia computer from Japan, 1983. Or a “multipurpose SLAP computer”, as they call it. While it looks like a screen on the left, that is actually just transparent plastic. Inside, you put “capsules” with pages, and the computer controls which page is displayed. The cassette player is used for playing audio, and for data storage.

Cefucom seems to be based on Sanyo’s PHC-25 that has a 32×16 or 16×16 textmode, so you can have a big font to display Japanese characters decently.

More: here, here, here, here.

Glenn Howarth’s workstation for Telidon graphics, which he made 1981-1985. The photo is from the book Machine stitched into a corner of the Canadian modern age flag: Glenn Howarth’s Telidon art (pdf) that has plenty of Howarth’s not so text graphics. It was written by John Dorno, who has been researching and restoring Telidon art for years.

Learn more about Telidon

This looks like a great keyboard for text graphics. There are dedicated keys for switching character sets, choosing and defining colours, manipulating fonts (DCRS), etc. Towards the top right, it looks like a dedicated set of keys for “pixeling” on a sub-char level?

This is the TBT-03 keyboard by Loewe, for the MCT 26 television. Circa 1984. It is used for the German videotex format BTX (and possibly other similar CEPT-standards like the Mupid?). Found here. Also see the TBT-02 keyboard

Paul Rickards uses the Silver Reed Colour Pengraph EB50 from 1984 as typewriter and plotter. It’s like vector graphics on a typewriter. Photos and video here.

Manuel Vio’s first attempt at PETSCII, using @nurpax‘s new Petmate editor. via @manuelvio 

Glyphdrawing, a new online textmode editor that supports ttf-font import and independent font size and cell size. Made by grmmxi (images from his Instagram) and Ian Tuomi.

Article in Popular Electronics 1974 to build an ASCII-compatible keyboard for 40 USD. Posted on archive.org as Apple documentation, so this was presumably used for the Apple I.

An obscure little program in German to convert images into text, using the words of your choice. It seems to be called RUTVIEW and you can download it here.

Viditel, a Dutch videotex service from 1980s.