3 ms·
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 r
by 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 agoYou 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 agoYes, 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!