Under the headline: 'Cathode Ray Tube's Rivals Demonstrated', a front page story in Electronics Weekly’s edition of October 25th 1972 starts off: ‘The first commercial versions of Control Data Corp’s plasma display, the flat display panel which promises to rival the cathode ray tube in many alpha-numeric and graphic display applications, were demonstrated in London last week.’
The EW story continues: ‘They are a plasma display terminal and a touch-sensitive plasma display . Both are capable of asynchronous operation and handling data up to 40kilobits/sec.’
The CDC plasma display terminal measured 15 inches wide, by 6.6 inches high, by 2 inches deep. ‘It’s display capability is 256 characters – upper case letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and special symbols – in eight rows of 32 characters,’ continues the report.
The CDC touch-sensitive plasma display had a feature called ‘Digiscribe’, described in the EW story as enabling ‘switching actions such as a change in display or a control function, to be performed simply by touching a pad on the display panel with the finger. The inconvenience of operating a keyboard is eliminated. Up to 20 touch pads can be arranged on the face of a glass coverplate secured to the display panel.”
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