[2] Since this terminal was intended to replace a teleprinter such as those made by Teletype Corporation it was one of the first glass TTYs (glass for the screen, TTY as the abbreviation for "Teletype") ever produced.
It also had 25 rows of 72 columns of upper-case characters, rather than the 80 x 24 that would become more common in subsequent years.
Like most terminals designed up until the mid-1970s, the Datapoint 3300 was implemented using TTL logic in a typical mix of small-scale and medium-scale integrated circuits,[4] i.e. in a very similar way to how many minicomputers of the 1970/80s (such as the Digital VAX-11) were built.
Later terminals (such as the VT100) typically used a microprocessor to implement large parts of the user interface and general logic.
Thus, the terminal stored its display of 25 rows of 72 columns of upper-case characters using fifty-four 200-bit shift registers, arranged in six tracks of nine packs each, providing shift register memory for 1800 6-bit characters.