Charactron was a

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

registered trademark The registered trademark symbol, , is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or wor ...

(number 0585950, 23 February 1954) of Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation (

Convair Convair, previously Consolidated Vultee, was an American aircraft manufacturing company that later expanded into rockets and spacecraft. The company was formed in 1943 by the merger of Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft. In 1953, i ...

) for its shaped electron beam

cathode ray tube A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms ( oscilloscope), pictu ...

. Charactron CRTs performed functions of both a display device and a

read-only memory Read-only memory (ROM) is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be electronically modified after the manufacture of the memory device. Read-only memory is useful for storing sof ...

storing multiple characters and fonts. The similar Typotron was a U.S. registered trademark (23 November 1953) of

Hughes Aircraft Corporation The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other prod ...

for its type of shaped electron beam

storage tube Storage tubes are a class of cathode-ray tubes (CRTs) that are designed to hold an image for a long period of time, typically as long as power is supplied to the tube. A specialized type of storage tube, the Williams tube, was used as a main mem ...

with a direct-view bistable storage screen. The Charactron CRT used an electron beam to flood a specially patterned perforated anode that contained the stencil patterns for each of the characters that it could form. The first deflection positioning of the electron beam steered the beam to pass through one of the (typically 64 or 116) characters and symbols that could be formed. The beam, which then had the cross-section of the desired character, was re-centered along the axis of the tube and deflected to the desired position of the screen for display. Alternately, as in the accompanying image, the entire matrix was filled with the electron beam then deflected through a selection aperture to isolate one character. The term Charactron is sometimes mistakenly applied to another type of CRT properly called a

monoscope A monoscope was a special form of video camera tube which displayed a single still video image. The image was built into the tube, hence the name. The tube resembled a small cathode ray tube (CRT). Monoscopes were used beginning in the 1950s ...

which generates an electrical signal by scanning an electron beam of uniform cross section across a printed pattern on an internal target electrode.

Applications

There were two basic types/uses of Charactrons: # Direct view — where the intended user watched the face of the tube. An example was the tube of the AN/FSQ-7 SAGE

Semi Automatic Ground Environment The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was a system of large computers and associated networking equipment that coordinated data from many radar sites and processed it to produce a single unified image of the airspace over a wide area. SA ...

computer console. # Photographic output — where the display screen was photographed by a

microfilm Microforms are scaled-down reproductions of documents, typically either photographic film, films or paper, made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading, and printing. Microform images are commonly reduced to about 4% or of the origin ...

camera for recording of computer generated data. The Stromberg-Carlson SC-4000 series system was a typical use of the tube The technical expertise, and trademarks, for the Charactron ultimately passed to Stromberg-Carlson,

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

, Stromberg DatagraphiX,

Anacomp Anacomp, Inc., is an American company that specializes in computer services and document management. It was founded in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1968 by Ronald D. Palamara, Robert R. Sadaka, and J. Melvin Ebbert, three professors at Purdue Univ ...

, and finally Lexel Imaging Systems.

Patents

* *

References

External links

Description of a Direct view Charactron used on a UNIVAC 1107 computer in the late 1960s
*

* ttp://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/sage/3-62-0_Display_System_Vol1_Aug58.pdf Theory of Operation for the SAGE display system. Detailed description of Charactrons Page 37 ff. Vacuum tube displays {{electronics-stub

Applications

Patents

See also

References

External links