Compare this keyboard to the "029" keyboard option for the Entrex Data/Scopes (Keystations). As the Entrex 480 advertisements state, this keyboard layout was a featured option on the Entrex Keystations so that operators who were used to the IBM 029 keypunch keyboard layout were able to transition to using the Entrex Data/Scope without any re-training on the keyboard layout. How cool was that?!
It should be noted that the PDP-11 is mounted into an Entrex 480/Nixdorf 620 Rack Chassis, so this is a "PDP Retrofit" into an Entrex 480 system chassis!
Too bad that all of this was scrapped many decades ago...but we thank Alan for the vintage picture!!!
These pics were taken by my friend Kris on his visit today to the Muzeum Historii Komputerów i Informatyki (Museum of the History of Computers and Information Technology) in Katowice, Poland.
What an honor it was to see him there, wearing our branded T-shirt! I cannot wait for the time to come for me to visit this wonderful place myself!
You can actually see the Nixdorf badge pasted right over where the Entrex logo silkscreen would have been in the lower left of the plexiglass on the screen
Notice that the build date on the ID tag of this keyboard says 1986, even though that is a full 7-8 years after the build of the rest of the terminal (1978-79). The IC chip dates all seem to back this up on the keyboard (84-85 dates) and the terminal (78-79 dates) This is curious, but not unheard of.
Since only 5 of these terminals are documented to survive in the world so far, what are the dates of the other 4 keyboards? We shall find out...because we have 3 of them, and we hope to get dates from the other two!
See this great article from the HNF (Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum) from Paderborn, Germany. They mention us, which is WAY cool...thank you, HNF, for this great article!
BURLINGTON/MASSACHUSETTS - Heinz Nixdorf's plans for America were created ten years ago. In 1972, Nixdorf Computer Corporation was founded in Chicago. The gradual expansion of US activities came to a provisional conclusion in 1977 with the takeover of the data entry specialist Entrex. The Nixdorf Computer Corporation, whose headquarters were relocated to Burlington (Massachusetts) as part of the Entry integration, is now the largest subsidiary of the Paderborn company.
Throw in several hundred Nixdorf Computer Corp. key-entry devices and hundreds of Omron Electronics, Inc. and Tektronix, Inc. interactive terminals for programmer and analyst use, plus various microform producers and flat-bed plotters and some idea emerges of the size of an operation that keeps one Univac 1108 mainframe around just for backup.
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