Columbia's IBM 2250 in the 360/91 machine room about 1972.
The IBM 2250
Display Unit was originally shipped with the
IBM 1130 computer,
introduced in 1965.
The 2250 could also be attached to IBM 360-series mainframes, as ours was to
the 360/91. Like most IBM terminals, attachment was via control unit (or
in this case, direct channel) rather than communication port.
The 2250 was the
"first
commercially available graphics terminal" if you don't count the
DEC PDP-1 display (1961).
As late as 1971 there were only about 1000 interactive CRT graphic
terminals installed in the USA, compared with 100,000 line printers,
50-100,000 Teletypes, and 70,000 "alphanumeric
terminals" (such as the 2260) (CACM Vol.14 No.1,
January 1971, p.60).
IBM 2250 and 1130 at
EXPO '70 US Pavilion
Columbia's 2250 was intended for use by physicists to read, display, and
interact with cloud chamber photos, from
ongoing physics experiments in the machine room (the 360/91 was partially
funded by physics research grants).
From Peter Capek of IBM, who was here in the 1960s: "The 2250 was a totally
different beast [from the 2260]. I don't know about
the cost, but $100K doesn't seem implausible for the channel-attached version.
It was a separate product, sold either for use with an 1130 (stand-alone small
machine, mostly targeted at engineering/design applications), as a design
workstation for use with a S/360 (channel attached), or in a special version
that was built into the /91 console and not an option. I think the latter
version cheated a bit on the refresh memory size and flexibility...
Operator Hank Butler playing Chess on the 2250 about 1971.
"It mostly was not used [at Columbia], as I recall, because the
support for it in the operating system was almost non-existent. (No
other 360 beside the 91 and 95 (195?) had this, so IBM didn't put a lot of
effort into it.) It was a vector display with drawn characters and a light
pen, so you could point at something on the screen, drag a crosshair, etc.
I can't recall ever seeing anything other than characters on the machine at
Columbia, and that only very rarely. I believe the 2250 per se did predate
System/360, but I'm quite sure it could not be connected to a709x system. I
also can't recall it ever being used for any HPD function at Columbia,
perhaps in part because of it's location as the operator's console; can't
have physicists wandering arount there. The console function was provided
by the 1052, a mechanical Selectric-typewriter like printer/keyboard." [In
the 1970s, after Peter's time, it was indeed an operator display, used for
showing active jobs.]
Hank Butler was a longtime member of the Machine Room operations staff in
various roles, such as chief Tape Librarian. He is shown playing a game of
chess against the 360/91 on the 2250 about 1971: an early computer chess
program called CCCP (Columbia Computer Chess Program) written
by Steve Bellovin (now
Computer Science faculty member) and Columbia Computer Center programmers
Aron Eisenpress, Ben Yalow, and Andy Koenig (son of Seymour Koenig, director
of IBM Watson Lab at Columbia University
1952-1970).
Peter Kaiser, who was also here in the 1960s, confirms that the 2250 was new
with the 360/91, whose predecessor, the 7094/7040 Directly
Coupled System, had "an attached device, not a 2250, used to read and
display cloud chamber photos. It was still there when I arrived in 1967 and
although there was some discussion of hooking it up to the 360 systems, I
think that never happened."
Sikorsky 2250 ad from 1968 - click to enlarge
Here's a picture of the 2250 from a 1968 Sikorsky Aircraft ad, showing an
enlarged version of the stroke-drawn character set, the light pen, and the
function keypad. The article: Engvold,
K.J., and J.L. Huges, A General-Purpose Display Processing and Tutorial
Systems, CACM Vol.11 No.10, October 1968, pp.697-702, describes the
ADEPT (A Display-Expedited Processing and Tutorial) system, an interactive
simulation, programming, information retrieval, and teaching system for OS/360
using a 2250 display station. An early and very expensive example of a
graphical user interface, with user input from keyboard, function keypad, and
light pen, and output in text and graphics, implemented entirely in software.
IBM followed the 2250 with a 3250 vector graphics unit, and later (mid 1980s)
by the 5080 raster graphics station.
