2. ACME system status panel, 1966 Designed by Robert Flexer and Klaus Holtz For the time-sharing and real-time data acquisition system in The Medical school, ACME, status indicators were provided on each of the 30 terminals, to reduce user frustration. The white ACME IS ON light was pulsed periodically, so that it would decay if the system went down. YOU ARE ON signaled each time slice allocated. The WAITING FOR YOU light indicated that input was expected from the terminal or a data-acquistion port, and the SPECIAL RUN ON light warned users that a high demand data acquisition task was in progress, reducing the performance for all others. Courtesy of Gio Wiederhold

3. DEC-10 system Memory Controller Board, modified for LOTS, the Stanford Low-Overhead Time Sharing System, 1977 By 1976 semi-conductor memory prices had dropped to the extent that large number of display terminals could each have their own buffer in a timeshared system. The buffersizes were adequate for 40 lines of 80 = 3200 characters each, requiring about 320, 000 bytes for 100 terminals. This was more than provided for in the original controller design, so that boards for LOTS were modified to allow high-order addressing. On PCs and workstations today, the entire display image is buffered, omitting the need for a hardware charcter generator, but requiring up to a Megabyte per display. Courtesy of Ralph Gorin