I'm old enough to remember when my college computer lab had an analog display for one of its systems...if I remember right, it was used for LaTeX applications and development, which during those days was still an interesting CS direction.
I used to be mesmerized by it..everything looked so clean and modern, much better then the crappy 80x25 "workstation" displays of the VAX's and PDP-11's.
This doesn't make sense in my head: I don't think vector displays were ever used for type setting, but I would love to be proven wrong. Do you have anymore information?
The 4014 had a series of commands for drawing both text and graphics
I was at the Florida Institute of Technology in 1985, and Lamport had just published the LaTex language and their was some interest in the department in getting a version of it running the the 4014...
I think someone hacked a version of it...but my aging memory fails me.
Vector displays don't usually handle text very well. They can draw perfect curves, but I don't think they could ever do the Bezier curves that fonts depend on.
Anyways, what you are referring to is in between vector and rasterized displays. Still very interesting. I should ask my dad about this (he worked for Textronix in the 70s).
I used to be mesmerized by it..everything looked so clean and modern, much better then the crappy 80x25 "workstation" displays of the VAX's and PDP-11's.