Tek 4010, info and prices 4019

AncientHacker

That might have been a list price for a 4014, maybe with some accessories like the paper printer. (The 4014 was the model with a much bigger screen).

Physically a 4010 was some low-density PCB's of digital and analog parts, the keyboard and GIN pots, a lot of trimpots (even for - believe it or not - adjusting the baud rate!), a LV and HV supply and the most important part: the storage tube.

Like most minis and test equpment of that era, there was the "list price" and the "real price", nobody paid "list price" and the discount to real price was substantial. If $2500 was the cost of a new storage tube (that sounds high but not by a whole lot) then I cannot see how the rest of the 4010 was possibly being sold for $9500. It was really just a sheet metal box and honestly a small number of low-density parts.

The 4010 was really an astonishingly clever design and implementation. In terms of price-performance it blew everything else off the map up until the mid-80's and hi-res raster bitmap workstations (most of which were used for little else but to emulate 4010's for a long time!)

That salesman must've been wanting to sell more CRT's :-). I know of many 4010's that lasted for way over a decade in daily use without a CRT replacement (just some semi-regular tweaking of trimpots and occasional GIN pot replacement - most applications ignored the GIN pots so they would last forever on 4010's used for those applications, but others used the GIN pots for a lot of user input and those didn't last long at all.) At say 100 erases a day times 300 days a year, that's 30,000 erases a year.

There were trimpots that had to be tweaked every so often for adjusting EVERYTHING in the 4010, including the erase potentials and timing. Maybe the place I used them (and maintained them) tweaked these pots to favor lifetime (mostly I just tweaked them either by the Tek book or until the result looked "right".)

Now the silver paper used in the Tektronix thermal-type 4010 printer, that could easily add up to some money.

Tim.