Silent 700
line of Texas Instruments portable computer terminals (1970s and 1980s)
The Silent 700, introduced in 1971, was a line of portable computer terminals manufactured by Texas Instruments in the 1970s and 1980s. Silent 700s printed with a 5 × 7 dot-matrix heating element onto a roll of heat-sensitive paper. Some models were equipped with an integrated acoustic coupler and modem that could receive data at 30 characters per second. Other models could be directly connected to computers at 300 bits per second (bit/s), and were sometimes used as the system console where a hard copy record of the activities would be retained for a period of time.
Local capabilities
A pair of local tape cartridge devices were included in some models, and data could be edited, tape-to-tape, for later transmission.
Model 725
The Model 725 added the ability to switch-select bit rates of 110, 150 and 300, corresponding to 10, 15 or 30 characters per second.
Model 745
The Model 745 was introduced late 1975 as "the lightest-weight portable now available."
1200 bit/s
As 1200 bit/s dialup communication became more common among Time-sharing providers, the Silent 700 faced the problem that its printhead technology simply couldn't "heat up all the little dots" at 120 characters per second. TI solved this in their 780-series terminals by creating a two-character-wide thermal head, which printed 60 pairs of characters per second. This allowed the product line to survive a few more years in the new high-speed interactive computing environment of the mid-1980s.
“Silent 700” enters the record as line of Texas Instruments portable computer terminals (1970s and 1980s). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Silent, line and Texas can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Silent 700” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Silent, line and Texas provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3483826. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1971, 1975 and 1200.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Silent 700” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.