Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
DIY: The Terminalscope
By James Grahame
Matt Sarnoff's Terminalscope is a VT100 compatible bidirectional serial terminal that displays a 54x24 character raster display on your workbench oscilloscope. Apart from the lack of an 80-column mode, the display is strikingly similar to the old VT100s I once wrangled. It features a flicker-free 60Hz screen update, 7-bit ASCII character set, reverse video and selectable bit rate from 2400-38400 bps.
Sarnoff explains what makes his design special: "A great thing about the Terminalscope is its simplicity. Other scope projects require an expensive DAC or an inaccurate R-2R ladder. Rather than draw each character with individual strokes, op-amps are used to generate a raster scan across the screen (like a TV) and the Z axis (beam intensity) is modulated directly by the microcontroller."
Full source code and a schematic diagram are available on his site, and you're encouraged to build upon this project to create something even cooler.
Terminalscope Serial Console [via Hack A Day]
