File:Uniscope stroke generation of characters.png

English: The Uniscope 100 was a communications terminal (screen and keyboard) designed for connecting to a UNIVAC computer system. It used a cathode ray tube as a screen on which alphanumeric characters were displayed. Early models of the Uniscope, such as the 100, directly controlled the CRT's electron gun to draw the characters as vector-graphic "strokes" on the screen. This is unlike the more well-known bitmap displays whose characters were made up of dots ("pixels").

This image is based on the Figure 4.1 from the Uniscope 100 Terminal Description from 1973, published by Unisys. It was originally captioned, "Figure 4-1. Stroke Generation Method Example (Characters D g shown)". Here is a brief excerpt from the relevant paragraph:

4.6. CHARACTER GENERATOR

The binary-coded characters in the display storage must be converted to characters that can be displayed on the CRT screen. This translation is accomplished by the character generator. The basic character generator can generate 64 unique symbols and is expandable to 96 symbols. A character from the display storage addresses the character generator once every storage cycle. The character generator paints the character by causing a succession of strokes of variable length, direction, and intensity to form the visible character on the screen. The stroke method of generating characters produces characters that are more easily recognized than other methods, such as the dot matrix method. Because as many as eight strokes are available for producing one character, each character has its own unique shape. (See Figure 4-1.)