Eric Smith wrote:

>It was "Williams Tube" memory.  It did need to be refreshed, and did not
>acchieve tremendous density.  It also was not terribly reliable.  It is
>rumored that the first video games were played on these; kinda neat having
>the frame buffer and display in the same device.

I think if you look back at the old computer games, you'll see that the
screen buffer is used for both video memory and program memory.  This also
lead to a number of problems of making sure that the program memory was only
accessed during the vertical retrace period.

The ultimate of this was the Sinclair ZX-81, which used the processor to
output the composite video, line by line and character by character and then
did the actual computing during vertical retrace (needless to say, it was
pretty slow).
Lots of interesting stuff from the past!

>I wonder how difficult it would be to make such a thing now?  And use a PIC
>to drive it, of course!

It shouldn't be that hard; a PIC ZX-81?  I think that would be an
interesting project!

myke

"I was well aware that the processes of puberty are often fatal to psychic
power."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle