A. Sinan Unur said:
Is the 3278 the one that actually had the APL symbols on the keys with,
gosh, I don't know, something like 96 functions keys? If so, I used that
one for about a year, and loved it (not APL, the keyboard
The 3278 was the main member of the second generation of 3270 devices,
introduced in 1976 or so. It had several keyboards to choose from; APL
was one of them.
I don't think I have ever heard of the 2260.
The 2260 series preceded the 3270 series; it was the main alphanumeric
CRT terminal of the S/360 generation. 6 lines of 40 characters or 12
lines of 80 characters. Because of the bulk and cost of core memory and
logic circuits, the brains were in the 2848 control unit, so the cables
from the computer room to the terminal carried actual video output and
direct keystroke information; and the memory was delay lines --
low-melting-point molten metal in long tubes designed to be exactly 1/30
or 1/60 of a second long at the speed of sound in the liquid, with a
pinger at one end and a microphone at the other, and a feedback loop to
keep it going. Some early mainframes used the same scheme for main
memory. (When the mainframe wanted to read the screen, the logic
actually read the pixels flying by and reconstructed the EBCDIC code
from the pixels.) Slow and expensive, but a lot zippier and quieter than
a Selectric-based printer-keyboard, which was the only real alternative.
(There was also a 2250 series, but that was a much more expensive
vector-based graphics system, suitable for playing "Asteroids" on.)
