3 ms·

Home Terminals (1999)

50 points by ecliptik 7y ago

jakecopp 7y ago
> When the Big Snow of 1978 hit, it came with plenty of warning. So I took two cases of my favorite beer and a full box of terminal paper home, and reminded the MIT operators to set the Multics machine for unattended reboot. The blizzard paralyzed the Boston area for a week, but I was able to work. The MIT Multics had only a few users logged in, and response was great. This made me smile!
dang 7y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multicians.org/terminals.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multi... looks the same, so I switched 2001 to 1999 above. It could of course go back earlier.
n4r9 7y ago
> The first people to have home terminals were those system programmers who might be called at any hour to investigate or repair a problem with the time-sharing system. These folks took home a machine that might cost as much as half a year's salary, and had a leased phone line connected to the MIT data PBX installed at home. They discovered that having a machine at home was useful not only for fixing the operating system, but also for programming and writing documents from home, and for sending electronic mail to other users on the MIT system. Imagine being one of the first people in the world to discover that you could sit at home and tap out messages to other people sitting at home, who'd pick them up instantly (or at their leisure).
- jakecopp 7y ago
  I wonder what things are just happening now that are the equivalent; the first people to experience something that will be so commonplace and useful.
russellbeattie 7y ago
For years, I could never understand what was special about vi, in that it was short for "visual". What was particularly visual about it? I also couldn't grasp the idea of "line editors" like ex and ed that came before it... How would that even work? Why one line at a time? Memory? Then one day I saw the famous picture of Gates and Allen at a teletype terminal for the 100th time, and it suddenly hit me. Oh! It was all printed out!! So as you were writing your program, it was being typed out on paper in front of you. Then you'd read the paper (maybe after a few lines) if you saw some errors, then you would use ed or ex to edit the program by entering the line number the replacement text. You'd do that a few times, then run the program again, or print it all out again to double your fixes. Ex would make that a lot easier than ed by allowing regular expressions, etc. So vi is a visual on-screen version for a monitor terminal. Duh! Took me years and years to grok this simple concept.
- cbm-vic-20 7y ago
  If teletypes seem clunky and primitive, remember this is still miles ahead of the previous computer programming interface: punch cards. TTYs allowed real-time interactive use of the computer. Even if only one line at a time.
kristianp 7y ago
I can see the motivation for APL in these slow terminals. It's surprising how long it took for screen-based terminals to appear, not until the early 80's, more than a decade after the first teletype ones.
jakedata 7y ago
I fished a DEC printing terminal and 300 baud modem out of a dumpster and got it all working again in the mid 80s. Obsoletely fabulous for dialing up the Northern Lights BBS and it prepared me for other exciting developments in IT.
jonjacky 7y ago
Around 1980, our department shared a portable printing terminal with a built-in modem, called by its manufacturer the "Silent 700". A friend observed, "It's silent when it's off."

50 points by ecliptik 7y ago

> When the Big Snow of 1978 hit, it came with plenty of warning. So I took two cases of my favorite beer and a full box of terminal paper home, and reminded the MIT operators to set the Multics machine for unattended reboot. The blizzard paralyzed the Boston area for a week, but I was able to work. The MIT Multics had only a few users logged in, and response was great. This made me smile!

dang 7y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multicians.org/terminals.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multi... looks the same, so I switched 2001 to 1999 above. It could of course go back earlier.

n4r9 7y ago

> The first people to have home terminals were those system programmers who might be called at any hour to investigate or repair a problem with the time-sharing system. These folks took home a machine that might cost as much as half a year's salary, and had a leased phone line connected to the MIT data PBX installed at home. They discovered that having a machine at home was useful not only for fixing the operating system, but also for programming and writing documents from home, and for sending electronic mail to other users on the MIT system. Imagine being one of the first people in the world to discover that you could sit at home and tap out messages to other people sitting at home, who'd pick them up instantly (or at their leisure).

jakecopp 7y ago
I wonder what things are just happening now that are the equivalent; the first people to experience something that will be so commonplace and useful.

russellbeattie 7y ago

For years, I could never understand what was special about vi, in that it was short for "visual". What was particularly visual about it? I also couldn't grasp the idea of "line editors" like ex and ed that came before it... How would that even work? Why one line at a time? Memory? Then one day I saw the famous picture of Gates and Allen at a teletype terminal for the 100th time, and it suddenly hit me. Oh! It was all printed out!! So as you were writing your program, it was being typed out on paper in front of you. Then you'd read the paper (maybe after a few lines) if you saw some errors, then you would use ed or ex to edit the program by entering the line number the replacement text. You'd do that a few times, then run the program again, or print it all out again to double your fixes. Ex would make that a lot easier than ed by allowing regular expressions, etc. So vi is a visual on-screen version for a monitor terminal. Duh! Took me years and years to grok this simple concept.

cbm-vic-20 7y ago
If teletypes seem clunky and primitive, remember this is still miles ahead of the previous computer programming interface: punch cards. TTYs allowed real-time interactive use of the computer. Even if only one line at a time.

kristianp 7y ago

I can see the motivation for APL in these slow terminals. It's surprising how long it took for screen-based terminals to appear, not until the early 80's, more than a decade after the first teletype ones.

jakedata 7y ago

I fished a DEC printing terminal and 300 baud modem out of a dumpster and got it all working again in the mid 80s. Obsoletely fabulous for dialing up the Northern Lights BBS and it prepared me for other exciting developments in IT.

jonjacky 7y ago

Around 1980, our department shared a portable printing terminal with a built-in modem, called by its manufacturer the "Silent 700". A friend observed, "It's silent when it's off."