Monty McGraw and the 4054
Monty McGraw never worked for Tektronix but experienced the 4051 first hand. He is an associate of the museum and has assisted us with our restoration of our 4054A. In his own words:
| I'm a Tektronix 4050 Enthusiast - I used a 4051 in my first job after university in the late 1970's and learned BASIC programming. It was my first personal computer experience and I loved it!
I still love writing new vector graphics programs for it and have exhibited my 4054A every year at VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) shows for the last five years. |
Monty again exhibited at the the Southwest 2026 show, which was even bigger this year with an exhibit room twice the size as before and had about 1800 attendees.
His demonstrations at the show included new hardware:
- His 4050 Buffered GPIB Flash Drive V2 which supports connections to other Tektronix GPIB peripherals like 4662 printer and TM5000 instrumentation modules
- His 4050 Stereo CD quality Audio board option which attaches to the Flash Drive and uses one new BASIC command to control playing MP3 and WAV files
The museum sent Monty a sketch of the 4051 top shelf so he could make one for his 4054 out of wood painted to match the 4054. It supports displaying this poster above the 4054.
He demonstrated some new 4050 BASIC programs. This image is from his Mastermind game.
This video is from his Battlestar Galactica Demo2 which controls and syncs the audio board to the Battlestar MP3 sound tracks.