Way back in 1967, when I was in graduate school, we had a KSR-33
TeleType paper-display terminal, fondly refered to as a 'tty'. With it
you could type at about 10 cps. Each time you hit a key a bell would
sound and a series of holes would be punched across a yellow paper tape
mounted on the right side of the keyboard. The tape had small sproket
holes running down the center of the tape allowing it to be pulled
through the punch head as you typed. This was how one entered a series
of instructions telling the computer what do to. Paper from a roll
beneath the keyboard pass up behind the keyboard and over a rubber drum,
where a print head printed the character. I think you may have seen
this kind of keyboard as props in the older scifi movies or movies about
newspapers. If you made a mistake on the last keystroke of the program
you had to start all over again. My major project was programming the
computer to sovle for x using the quadratic equation. The program, as I
recall, took about 15 to 20 minutes to enter and required about 15 feet
of tape. We would roll it up and send it to the Computer Center in
Austin, TX., where the CDC 6600 (because it cost 6.6 Million $) would
read it in, along with the data which was also punched into the tape,
and generate a prinout which was mailed back to us. It was either the
solution to our problem, or dump of the program indicating where the
errors were. It cost the Physics dept. $1,500/month to rent 15Kb of
storage. Toward the end of the semester the department contracted with
a local bank to use their new Honeywell 200 after business hours. We
would go down at 11pm and load the Fortran compiler, feed it our tapes
and get an immediate printout. At one of their tty's we would type
another tape with any needed corrections and retry it on the Fortran
compiler. A must quicker process ;-)... We were amazed with all the
speed and power.
BTW, did you hear about the STS computer that was announced last week?
It is 4 to 5 times faster than IBM's "Big Blue". BB takes 3.6 MWatts
and enough hardware to cover a football field. The STS computer
requires 1.6Kwatts and is only about twice the size of a PC, with 1GB of
RAM. The speed and power is amazing....
Jerry
R S Fenwick wrote:
>
> Wot in blazes does 'tty' stand for, folks? :o)
>
> any help much appreciated ;)
>
> Rob Fenwick
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