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Cheesy video for AT&T's Frame Creation Terminal, a 1982 graphics workstation

Xeni Jardin at 7:42 pm Tue, Oct 9, 2012

The Bell Labs-produced Frame Creation Terminal (FCT) was an all-in-one graphics system designed to generate the types of pages used by the Viewtron system.

Price: $34,000 in 1982 dollars, or about $81K today. The first customer for this system was Viewdata Corporation, the company jointly owned by AT&T and Knight-Ridder.

More about the system here, and more awesomely cheeseball videos in the AT&T Tech Channel on YouTube.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

TAGS: video vintage ads

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http://lectiblog.blogspot.com/ lecti

Yes it is awesome.

About the last 5 min of the video: was it that difficult to hire someone who can draw back then?
Frank Diekman

At 0:49 – Hello, I’m Troy McClure!
http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline

its amazing how subjective ‘high resolution’ is, i bet there’s a ‘moor’s law’ ish curve around there somewhere
http://www.facebook.com/harrkev Kevin Harrelson

I remember using the Viewtron system back when I was much, much younger. A friend of mine in high school had the service in West Palm Beach, FL. The box hooked up to your TV, and had a 1200 baud modem (OMG the speed). For the time, it was a very cool (if expensive) service.