3270

The 3270 had the finest, strongest, most industrial strength keyboard in the known universe.

When I was at RPI, we were still in the mainframe universe and there were real, gen-u-wine IBM 3277 terminals and cheap Courier knockoffs around campus. Now I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and I have large hands. If I was using a Courier, I would regularly attract people who came by wondering what the hell all the noise was and/or whether I was beating on the terminal with a hammer. The IBM keyboards, though, were solid. I've always said that I want to have a couple of them nearby when the vandals storm the computer room. You could drive away the invaders and go right back to coding.

- The keyboard was the size of a C64
- Keyboard click volume was adjusted by a mechanical knob at the bottom
- also in the keyboard was a flap for the miniature users guide
- the lock was easy to disable by removing a side cover and pulling one wire from the lock. (A tea spoon being the only tool needed for the job)
- The display had 24 usable lines and 80 columns
- Screen attributes (i.e. bright, underlined, input field, blink) would take one character on the screen.
- Early versions were only able to display upper case characters, with no national character set (except for US) support.
- The retail price in the mid-70s was comparable to the price of a compact car. The VW Beetle was less expensive.
- sending one screen or one line at a time (instead of one character) saved a huge amount of processing power.
- scrolling was not implemented.