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Terak Museum
ERAK MUSEUM - UCSD PASCAL MUSEUM - USUS LIBRARY ANCIENT ALPHABETIC ART - LIBRARY - ALTAIR AND IMSAI EMULATORS REVIVING CASSETTE DATA - DISK UTILITIES - COMPUTER RESCUE WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE What is a Terak? It is an early personal computer made by the Terak Corporation of Scottsdale, Arizona. It was sold from about 1979 until 1985.
An early bitmapped display In his "An Unofficial History of Graphical User Interfaces", Stanford University Professor Anthony E. Siegman mentions the Terak in his "Histories of Individual Graphic User Interface Elements," saying the UCSD P-System used one of the first keyboard-based menus (where you selected functions by pressing the key corresponding to the first letter of the function, such as "F" for Filer and "L" for "directory." Few had any file format per se, although some had headers that included the image's dimensions, and most contained other trailing junk from memory that had been written to disk when saved. The story of Terak Corporation involves engineers in mountain cabins, furiously composing circuit boards, defense contractors, Chinese computer enthusiasts attracted to the customizable graphics, venture capitalists, and a sad tale of crash-and-burn.
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