In a recent note, Chris Hoelscher said: > Date: Sat, 5 Aug 2006 08:16:36 +0800 > > why allergic? because it has not been VAX-inated? > That vendor brought my epiphany 28 years ago. We had been using a decsystem-10, dialed in via Teletype ASR-33. Then we got a TI "portable" printer-keyboard terminal to take on demos. Wow! 30 cps! Dot matrix on thermal paper. I logged in to TOPS-10 to try it. And I was astonished that the messages, colmn headings, etc. were in mixed case; the ASR-33 had folded them. Wow! This system is talking to me in English orthography! (Regardless that the TI's concept of minuscule was just short caps.) How considerate of the designers!
My conversion was instantaneous; I never turned back from Damascus, but vowed to spread the gospel to the heathen. A few years later, at another employer, we were using a Documation impact printer, on which we kept a T-11 compatible band loaded for printing documents. It was about 40% busy during prime shift. But I remember the OLD old-timers (Cretaceous as opposed to Triassic) standing around as it printed hexadecimal reports and clucking about what a waste of cycles the T-11 band constituted. I suppose if we had switched to the P-11 band we could have got the utilization down to 30%. -- gil -- StorageTek INFORMATION made POWERFUL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
