The Vectrex console from the early 1980s holds a special place in retrocomputing lore thanks to its vector display — uniquely for a home system, it painted its graphics to the screen by drawing them with an electron beam, instead of scanning across a raster as a TV screen would. It thus came with its own CRT, and a distinctive vertical screen form factor.
For all that though, it was just a games console, but there were rumors that it might have become more. [Intric8] embarked on a quest to find some evidence, and eventually turned up what little remains in a copy of Electronic Games magazine. A keyboard, RAM and ROM expansion, and a wafer drive were in the works, which would have made the Vectrex a quirky equal of most of what the likes of Commodore and Sinclair had to offer.
It’s annoying that it doesn’t specify which issue of the magazine has the piece, and after a bit or browsing archive.org we’re sorry to say we can’t find it ourselves. But the piece itself bears a second look, for what it tells us about the febrile world of the 8-bit games industry. This was a time of intense competition in the period around the great console crash, and developers would claim anything to secure a few column inches in a magazine. It’s not to say that the people behind the Vectrex wouldn’t have produced a home computer add-on for it if they could have done, but we remember as teenagers being suckered in by too many of these stories. We still kinda want one, but we’d be surprised if any ever existed.
If you have a Vectrex, it’s possible to give it a light pen.
Can anyone elaborate on what a “wafer drive” (or in the article “Software for the computer is made on wafer-tapes”) is?
I’m guessing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotronics_Wafadrive
An article in The Logical Gamer (June 1983) (https://archive.org/details/logical_gamer_jun83/page/5/mode/1up?q=vectrex), says that ” The system will use built-in BASIC and memory storage will be provided with the use of a wafer-type storage device (also known as a stringy floppy), a storage medium that is as easy to use as a cassette and provides 128K bytes of storage.”.
Searching for “stringy-floppy” led me to the Exatron Stringy Floppy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exatron_Stringy_Floppy) which explains it as “The Exatron Stringy Floppy (or ESF) is a continuous-loop tape drive developed by Exatron.”
its a endless loop tape format, whomever was marketing these things back in the 80’s did a good job, but it never really sold, coleco was going to use them (along with maybe a form of CED based mini disk rom thing) along with a bunch of other vaporware next gen type machines (as noted above).
I think the only thing that got close was the microdrives on the later Sinclair computers (though not exactly the same) and guess what, that was a dumpster fire. Looped tape has its fair share of issues in consumer audio space, now add in higher speed, thinner smaller tape and jam it in a tiny box and … profit? no that’s not the word …
the things i’ve seen referred to as “wafer drives” are these thingies right here.
Volume 2 Number 10, Electronic Games (Reese Communications), December 1983
https://www.digitpress.com/library/magazines/electronic_games/electronic_games_dec83.pdf
Page 8.
Was there ever even a prototype of that thing produced? There were some fun claims made there. Built in BASIC (as was the thing to do then) would have gotten my attention. Sound Studio would surely have drawn a certain crowd. (But, the buzz, ugh!)
I can’t really imagine how bad it would be to read a vector driven text display for hours on end. Maybe they were able to generate a raster scan?
We all had to put up with a lot back then. CDC mainframe consoles had vector displays. It wasn’t all THAT painful, especially since such displays could use longer-persistence phosphors.
And then, of course, there were the Tektronix 4010 vector STORAGE CRT terminals…
Oh, my, I had forgotten those. They were always the last terminals to be occupied in the computer labs.
You could watch them draw the characters as they stumbled down the screen, and when you were done with that screen, there was a button to refresh the screen and start again at the top.
Fortunately (?) the text editor on the CDC 7600 we had was not a visual editor, it was a line editor. You would enter some change commands, then some display commands to see what damage you had done to your file. The Tek terminals, because of their slow display method, encouraged you to think way ahead and risk a lot of editor commands all at once.
What could possibly go wrong?
Can be found on Ebay. Reletively expensive though.
Wow, I had no idea people were trying to do faux-HMDs that early. Using a color wheel to interact with the CRT is so clever. I wonder how much this inspired the LCD shutter goggles from decades later.
there were a few earlier experimental HMDs but the first “successful” product was probably the VPL technology’s EyePhone released in 1989 with 102 degree fov coming from dual LCDs with a whopping 320X240 per eye resolution 30hz refresh rate. I found one on ebay a few years ago for $400, a steep discount from its original $9500 pricetag.
Also https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing-1983-09/page/n219/mode/2up for the picture of the keyboard
I had one that was the crowning Glory of my life on at the age of 11 or so. It was just so weird, so quasi-military looking from a 1970s viewpoint. Everything in wire frame. But the games were super hard and challenging but still super fun. The names elude me but it was for the most part cloned arcade games like tank battle, and asteroids etc, totally bang in.
John Sherrington
Props at shaw.ca
The OG Computer graphics game (Spacewar) was done with a vector graphics screen. Additionally, Tektronix, an oscilliscope maker, might have had some infuence here as they created a terminal (the 4014) using vector graphics and the results were very graphics capable (Good enough for early 3D Graphics work) considering standard terminals of the era (1970’a) could really only do bitmap letters.