The VT180 is a personal computer produced by
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...
(DEC) of
Maynard,
Massachusetts
Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...
, USA.
Introduced in early 1982, the
CP/M
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/Intel 8085, 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Dig ...
-based VT180 was DEC's entry-level microcomputer. "VT180" is the unofficial name for the combination of the
VT100
The VT100 is a video terminal, introduced in August 1978 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was one of the first terminals to support ANSI escape codes for cursor control and other tasks, and added a number of extended codes for special ...
computer terminal
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had a front panel to input or display ...
and VT18X option.
The VT18X includes a 2 MHz
Zilog Z80
The Zilog Z80 is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit microprocessor designed by Zilog that played an important role in the evolution of early personal computing. Launched in 1976, it was designed to be Backward compatibility, software-compatible with the ...
microprocessor and 64K RAM on two circuit boards that fit inside the terminal, and two external 5.25-inch
floppy disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...
drives with room for two more in an external enclosure.
The VT180 was codenamed "Robin".
Digital later released a full-fledged personal computer known as the
Rainbow 100
The Rainbow 100 is a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1982. This desktop unit had a monitor similar to the VT220 and a dual-CPU box with both Zilog Z80 and Intel 8088 CPUs.
The Rainbow 100 was a triple-use ...
as the successor to Robin.
When Digital ended the VT100 terminal family in 1983,
it also discontinued the VT180. No direct replacement was offered, although the Rainbow 100 eventually provided a superset of Robin's functionality.
References
External links
DEC Robin DigiBarn Computer Museum
DEC VT180 Terminals Wiki
Character-oriented terminal
DEC computer terminals
8-bit computers
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