The Early History of Computer Terminal Corporation — by Austin Roche, son of Gus Roche
All of those who worked at CTC, Datapoint or Intelogic Trace, whether it was during the late 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s or even the 1990’s, felt that year after year, new ground was being broken by these companies in distributed data processing and personal computing. The first successful RS232 compatible video terminal (DP3300), the first fully integrated desktop computer (DP2200), the origin of the X86 CPU architecture, first local area network and operating system to be widely deployed (ARCNET and RMS operating system), voice and video conferencing, and many more innovations that today are often taken for granted in the world view and even misplaced in historical origin.
As the son of one of the founders of CTC and Datapoint and a past employee, I am pleased to share the small archive that belonged to my father Gus Roche for the benefit of all those that created, innovated and fostered the success of these three companies, and the many customers that contributed to the unique experience of this era.
There is absolutely no doubt that CTC, Datapoint and Intelogic Trace singly lead the personal computing and data processing industry in a whole new direction beginning in the late 1960’s. We can now look back and clearly see what all of us have been saying for so long. It happened here first. We individually and collectively own a large slice of the way people interact and socialize in the information age. In the following article, I’ll do my best to describe the basis of the documents that I have mined from my father’s personal archive. The archive does not contain a great deal of documents and I am sure that others who were more deeply involved than I can produce more that can be added to the record. But these base documents stand alone and are of fascinating historical significance.
Blast from the past: Datapoint Plant 1977
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Blast from the past: IT
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