Dumb Terminals
Dumb Terminals are glass Teletypes.
Teletypes were in use over phone lines
in the 1920's. That's how newspapers
sent stories to their operations in different cities. They had a telegraph fax for halftone images.
Terminals have no computer inside.
The Teletype was a terminal to other Teletypes...on phone lines.
50 years ago...
Back in 1974, the Altair became the first
personal Computer. Hobbyists connected them to Teletypes with paper-tape readers,
and Personal Computing became reality.
Click on the Altair 8800 Teletype to see
what the process was like, using a computer with no monitor screen, and
no storage media
(No Disks or Thumb Drives, not even a cassette !)
Your phone is a terminal to the internet.
Steve Wozniak suggested to HP that
they could put a
6502 computer motherboard inside
a Dumb Terminal, to make a small computer.
I first played Adventure on a Dumb Terminal, a Teletype connected to a
NanoData Minicomputer of the late 1970's.
It was impressive seeing and hearing
the computer type back to me in the game.
Bob Supnik wrote the CARD to DEC-TAPE
routine for DEC.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) produced over 50,000 PDP-8 minicomputers. The PDP-8 was the first minicomputer to be commercially successful.
Edson de Castro and Gordon Bell, both engineers at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), designed the initial version of the PDP-8 minicomputer.
Afterward, de Castro was frustrated by DEC’s refusal to approve a family of 16-bit computers he wanted to design. So he and other DEC engineers launched Data General in 1968 and created their own 16-bit design..
I found an old Selectric, and was thinking of
interfacing it to my Timex Sinclair...
along with a TI99/4a keyboard...
But then I got a Commodore 64
with a printer and floppy drive...
And wrote a music program that
could transpose, and save to the floppy...
- Like STAFF...
Transistors like Grains of Sand
[Chuck's 00Cedar JPICedar ]
[ This page built with JPICedar by Chuck Darling Friday Jan-17-2025 Time : 7:46a]