Tektronix invented "storage tube" oscilloscopes in the early 1960s, and adapted it for computer graphics use in the early '70s. It was an interesting niche market for them, and they dominated it for ten years or so, until the price of memory fell so steeply that it was cheaper to store pixels in RAM (and paint them on the display screen many times per second) than it was to store pictures in the form of patterns of charge density on the interior of a vacuum tube.
In the early '70s, the vacuum-tube approach was enormously cheaper than the RAM approach, and Tektronix had a lock on it. They were incredibly good at making beams of electrons do amazing things inside a glass envelope.
However, the relentless march of Moore's Law caused made memory cheaper by the 1980s, and Tektronix lost its edge.
Ironically, the standard of excellence for the computer-graphics terminals that were used to actually design the chips (one example of which was the once-ubiquitous "Applicon" machine) used Tektronix storage-tube technology to display the integrated-circuit wiring and diffusion patterns, enabling engineers to create the chips (including memory chips) entirely electronically, without using the cumbersome Rubylith-and-Exacto-knife technique that ruled the 1960s.
Thus, Tek storage-tube technology was used to make itself obsolete, an excellent example of "creative destruction."
Anyway, the thing about the Tektronix graphics terminals was that they looked incredibly cool in operation, far more romantic than the massively brute-force solution that we are all used to today.
Patterns, either text or graphics, popped up on the screen as a brightly glowing spot flashed and hopped about in an amazing — albeit brief — flurry of activity. When it was finished, the resulting image glowed softly on the screen, in a pretty shade of green.
The drawing action was so slow (compared to today's technology) that it seemed incredibly fast. With today's technology, this process happens essentially instantly; it doesn't seem like "work" for the computer because it happens so fast. This is the type of thing I loved about the state of computer technology during my youth. You could actually see the machines work, which I thought was very impressive. Nowadays, they just overwhelm the task at hand with so many billions of transistors that it has lost its glamour.
Battlestar Galactica used the "cool" appearance of Tek display technology on screen at least once in every episode (at least that I saw). In fact, outtakes of BG are probably the only place you can still see that technology in action.
Ironically, the standard of excellence for the computer-graphics terminals that were used to actually design the chips (one example of which was the once-ubiquitous “Applicon” machine) used Tektronix storage-tube technology to display the integrated-circuit wiring and diffusion patterns, enabling engineers to create the chips (including memory chips) entirely electronically, without using the cumbersome Rubylith-and-Exacto-knife technique that ruled the 1960s.
Thus, Tek storage-tube technology was used to make itself obsolete, an excellent example of “creative destruction.”
...
Reminds me of employees being strong armed into training their H1B replacements.