2 ms·

I was 8 years old in 1970. My dad was working for NCR in Waltham, Mass. He'd bring home a honkin' huge teletype and an acoustic coupler on the weekends. I taugh

by ingler 12y ago

I was 8 years old in 1970. My dad was working for NCR in Waltham, Mass. He'd bring home a honkin' huge teletype and an acoustic coupler on the weekends. I taught myself BASIC and got hooked on Hamurabi [0], my first computer game vice. How much paper did all of us go through back then? [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi

Stratoscope 12y ago
A lot of paper! Do you remember the first time you saw one of those newfangled "glass teletypes"? A terminal that printed out your typing and the mainframe's reply on a CRT instead of paper? Was your first thought anything like mine: "How do I look back at what I was working on a few minutes ago? There's no roll of paper piled up behind the machine! How do I see my printouts?"
- ingler 12y ago
  You know, I honestly can't recall my first glass teletype. I'm younger than you are so maybe it seemed like a natural evolution at the time. I left the computer world in the late 70s when I discovered girls, music and partying. I came back to it the 80s when I learned about networked computers. Even through all of the intervening years, my coding still sucks. ; )
- todd8 12y ago
  Yes, I used a video display terminal for the first time in a computer lab full of strange gear at MIT 40 years ago. The computer had to have its initial boot loader loaded from a strip of perforated paper tape. The terminal had characters "drawn" by the crt tube's electron beam. If there were a lot of characters on the screen the first few lines would start to fade before the e-beam was able to back to the top of the screen. By keeping the overhead room lights off, we could see almost a full 24 lines of 40 character. It seemed so advanced compared to the punch cards that I'd used for years before. Those were the days!

2 ms·

I was 8 years old in 1970. My dad was working for NCR in Waltham, Mass. He'd bring home a honkin' huge teletype and an acoustic coupler on the weekends. I taugh

by ingler 12y ago

Stratoscope 12y ago
A lot of paper! Do you remember the first time you saw one of those newfangled "glass teletypes"? A terminal that printed out your typing and the mainframe's reply on a CRT instead of paper? Was your first thought anything like mine: "How do I look back at what I was working on a few minutes ago? There's no roll of paper piled up behind the machine! How do I see my printouts?"
- ingler 12y ago
  You know, I honestly can't recall my first glass teletype. I'm younger than you are so maybe it seemed like a natural evolution at the time. I left the computer world in the late 70s when I discovered girls, music and partying. I came back to it the 80s when I learned about networked computers. Even through all of the intervening years, my coding still sucks. ; )
- todd8 12y ago
  Yes, I used a video display terminal for the first time in a computer lab full of strange gear at MIT 40 years ago. The computer had to have its initial boot loader loaded from a strip of perforated paper tape. The terminal had characters "drawn" by the crt tube's electron beam. If there were a lot of characters on the screen the first few lines would start to fade before the e-beam was able to back to the top of the screen. By keeping the overhead room lights off, we could see almost a full 24 lines of 40 character. It seemed so advanced compared to the punch cards that I'd used for years before. Those were the days!