Hackin' it Old School

Intro | Middle School Programming | Computer Club | Teletype Terminal
BBS Lists | BBS Users | BBS Commands
Programming Notes | Software Lists | College Programming | Photos


The Teletype Terminal

The Teletype terminal in school printed at approximately 50 baud on rolls of greenish-yellow rough newsprint paper. When the ribbon was low (which was often) it was difficult to read. Also, because of an alignment problem the first two characters in every row were always printed too close to each other.

I saved several dozen of these printouts which range from a few inches to a few feet long. I would have included more of them but the irregular surface causes the scans to take inordinates amounts of storage space so you'll have to make do with these few samples.

Front cover of the three-ring binder that contained the BASIC manual. When the school finally discarded the Teletype (they unceremoniously put it out with the rest of the trash) I snagged this manual as a souvenir.

 

Me logging in and out on October 11, 1979. Despite idling for a couple of minutes it's hard to believe such a simple process took a whopping three seconds of CPU time.

List of users and their account limits.

While this punch card is unrelated to the Teletype (I got it from a friend), I'm including it here because they're both from the same era.

Lunar Lander session, including a printout of the BASIC source code.

No fancy graphics or I/O here: when you played this version you were "flying blind," just like the Apollo astronauts (only without Mission Control to help you out).

The interface was simple: you started 100 km from the surface and the program asked you how much thrust you wanted to apply to the engines. Each time you responded caused ten seconds to elapse so the game wasn't actually in real time.


Intro | Middle School Programming | Computer Club | Teletype Terminal
BBS Lists | BBS Users | BBS Commands
Programming Notes | Software Lists | College Programming | Photos


Return to Kim Moser's Generic Home Page.
Copyright © 2024 by Kim Moser (email)
Last modified: Wed 14 October 2009 21:46:13