TV Typewriter
The TV Typewriter is a video terminal that could display two pages of 16 lines of 32 upper case characters on a standard television set.
Don Lancaster was an engineer at Goodyear Aerospace designing a high resolution video display for the military.
In addition to the six-page article, they also offered to ship out a larger 16-page version with complete layout plans for a mail-in fee of $2.
In the November issue, the editors apologized for the delays in shipping the TV Typewriter booklets to the thousands of readers that ordered them.
Don Lancaster also answered a series of reader questions and gave ideas for additional functions and uses for the TV Typewriter.
The compact design and complex circuitry made the TV Typewriter a challenging project for hobbyists.
The April 1975 issue of the Micro-8 Newsletter has 6 pages of user modifications and interface designs to connect the TV Typewriter to Mark-8 or SCELBI computers.
[8] The original TV Typewriter design did not include a serial interface, modem connection, or offline data storage on cassette tape.
A serial interface board designed by Roger Smith was published in the February 1975 issue of Radio Electronics.
Don Lancaster's prototype TV Typewriter which is now on display at the Computer History Museum has a surplus keyboard with an ASCII encoder circuit that was published in the February 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics.
[11] The plans for this encoder were also included in the TV Typewriter booklet Popular Electronics (April 1974) featured a complete keyboard kit designed by Don Lancaster and available from Southwest Technical Products for $39.50.
This time readers did not have to order a set of plans, since the complete design was published in 6 issues starting in February 1975.
The first advertisement for the CT-1024 appeared in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics on the page facing the Altair 8800 computer article.
The original TV Typewriter book cover shows an ASCII keyboard designed by Don Lancaster and sold by Southwest Technical Products.
