Tandberg TDV 2243

Tandberg TDV 2243
Manufacturer	Tandberg
Model	TDV 2243

The Tandberg TDV 2243 terminal was produced by Tandberg Data as a model of the TDV 2200 series terminals. It had dual personalities - DEC and IBM.

The Tandberg TDV 2243 was developed in Sweden in close cooperation with ABB and Volvo. End users at ABB and Volvo needed to communicate with both DEC PDP/VAX and IBM Mainframe computers. This was done by connecting the terminal to a gateway which in turn was connected to both computers. To switch from DEC to IBM and vice versa the user had to type a CSI (Control Sequence Introducer) command on the keyboard. A CSI command consisted of the characters ESC [ followed by other characters. On a standard VT100 terminal as an example the CSI command for moving the cursor to row 2 column 3 was CSI 2:3 H, that is ESC [ 2:3 H. And then for each IBM command, for example CLEAR, ATTN, SYSREQ, PF 1 - PF 24 different CSI sequences had to be typed by the user. Of course no-one did that, instead they had two terminals on their desk.

The TDV 2243 had a DEC IBM key that sent the correct CSI command to toggle the connection in the gateway between DEC and IBM. At the same time the status line changed to indicate DEC/IBM connection accordingly. The keyboard was engraved with DEC function keys in black and IBM function keys in green. When in IBM mode, the IBM function keys sent the correct CSI commands to operate the IBM mainframe computer. So the TDV 2243 replaced two terminals with one.

The terminal was delivered with two slightly different keyboard layouts TDV 1243/1 or TDV 1243/2 because ABB and Volvo had different demands. The keyboard layout could be selected in a menu.

The TDV 2243 was built on TDV 2230 DEC VT100 software.