Experimental Teleterminals - Hardware

We have felt for some time now that a telephone set capable of providing integrated voice and data communications is desirable. A series of experiments to explore the possible uses of such a phone is under way. The key word here is "experiments"; we are not describing a development project and in fact one would not build a commercial product the way these experiments were built. The sets described here were internally referred to as GETSETS, an acronym for Generalpurpose Electronic Telephone SETS. We have made a telephone with a microprocessor, a small keyboard, and a 5-inch cathode ray tube (CRT) display (see Fig. 1). The phone is small enough to sit permanently on your desk and measures about 9 inches wide, 10 inches deep, and 6 inches high. The keyboard has full American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) capability and the display has a capacity of 16 lines of 32 characters each. There are 12 buttons next to the display that can be labeled by writing text on the screen adjacent to the buttons. These buttons permit the user to perform any of a large number of complicated operations. The usual problem with having a large repertory of complicated operations 145