Sep 29, 2026, 10:29 AMThat's the model of DecWriter that I learned how to program on, back in college. The lab had three. Made an annoying rasping buzz when it printed.
A couple of years later the computer lab got one (1) small CRT with an attached keyboard. There was always a long line of students waiting to use it. If you got tired of waiting you could use a DecWriter, or come back to the lab at midnight.
Sep 29, 2026, 10:39 AMIt had an ASCII version of a Star Trek game, which I was always improving. The original was a variant of the classic BASIC game Super Star Trek.
Good times, man. Good times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_(1971_video_game)#Super_Star_Trek
That's probably the same "Star Trek" game I played on my uncle's teletype.
By the time I actually got to college, the usual interface was a video terminal. We had mostly VT-220s, a few VT-100s, and some "Adam" dumb terminals, especially at the telescope.
We also had a few classic Macintoshes in the computer lab at that point.
The main Astronomy department computers were running BSD Unix or VMS.
And of course, we had those big 9-track tape reels and readers -- I had one for my senior research data. I probably still have it somewhere. But I haven't seen it in a long time!
Played that game endlessly in the high school 'computer lab' on a teletype machine connected via telephone acoustic coupler.
Ah yes. "Acoustic coupler" -- that's what that phone handset cradle thing is called.
Yup. Still have a box somewhere of paper tape reels of some BASIC programs.
@mastodonmigration @TerryHancock @nyrath after one year of us doing that on wet games days the school worked out that they could buy two of the new fangled micro computer thingys for less than the phone bill.
FWIW - should you want to play them, the "Adventure" and "Star Trek" games are still available in Debian in the "bsdgames" package:
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/bsdgames
Of course, for the full experience, you'll have to buy a teletype and hook it up to your computer. But they work well in a terminal emulator window.
You can find Infocom games on the Internet Archive today.
Debian has multiple "Z-code" interpreter programs that can run them. I think I've used "jzip" and "frotz".
"Inform" is a language for writing your own text adventures in the same style -- there are tutorials, examples, and FOSS "text adventure" / "interactive fiction" games.
Sep 29, 2026, 7:44 PMArticle about a 1983 Infocom text adventure game named "Planetfall", found in a 1983 issue of Softline magazine.
It was ground breaking at the time, but now is common place.
Sep 29, 2026, 6:42 PM@TerryHancock @nyrath if you happen to still have a PDP-11 in the closet, I've written some instructions on how to compile the Colossal Case Adventure from the original FORTRAN. https://trmm.net/Advent/
@nyrath @TerryHancock Here's a new web site chronicling the evolution of Star Trek:
Sep 30, 2026, 3:17 AMif that's the lab I'm thinking of (that being where we met the first and only time in meat-space, introduced by @n1xnx at PoGo, G side), it was annoyingly long & narrow, so the BUZZ reverberated.
A year or two before the CRT (which arrived after I'd moved on to my own college), the DECWriter II was the good terminal (300baud?) compared to the IBM Selectric bouncing-golfball terminals (110? bit speed but moved slower than that).
Star Trek on the Selectric was a SLOW game
Sep 30, 2026, 11:35 AMYou are correct, that's the lab. The reverb was most annoying.
The IBM selectric was the only way a student could program in APL, using a special type ball.
@nyrath @n1vux @TerryHancock
I remember the song of the DECWriter in that lab. It's embarrassing to remember how much paper I went through with that game. I routinely blew through my computer time allotment with it.
Sep 30, 2026, 2:41 PMAnd if you knew one of the computer techs, you could get them to print a greyscale ASCII poster on the line printer.
Sep 30, 2026, 5:02 PM@nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
Could do the poster with a card deck yourself on most mainframes, but Ops might be annoyed (unless you let them copy the file). I don't recall if PoGo had RJE card readers; i only did cards in the summer at Orono. I got PAID to use cards on BU's academic 370!
@n1vux @nyrath @TerryHancock
ISTR that PoGo had only remote terminals, no card readers.
When I transferred to Orono for sophomore year, I got stuck off-site in Bangor at "Bangor Community College", AKA a set of disused Pease AFB barracks. (Transfer students were low-priority for on-campus housing). However, I was able to parlay this disadvantaged status into an interactive account that let me avoid having to ever submit punch card decks.
Naturally, I did all my programming work on the terminals in the computing center, which weren't as oversubscribed as the remote terminals in Bangor.
Sep 30, 2026, 7:34 PM@n1xnx
Pease AFB (Portsmouth NH) would have been a rough commute.
Bangor Int'l was DOW AFB (originally Godfrey Field).
(Both resonate in my memory because reasons.)
Sep 30, 2026, 7:57 PMThe year before I went to college, when I was in high school, there was a play by mail computer game called Galaxy-II. $5 a turn.
But it was only $2.50 a turn if you punched the Hollerith cards yourself, instead of forcing the referee to do it.
The ref would mail you photocopies of select pages of the keypunch operator's manual, and notes on how to fool the high school computer lab teacher into thinking that you knew what you were doing.
Sep 30, 2026, 8:10 PMI followed the notes to discover where the lab was, and what to say to the computer science teacher. He said "sure, you can use it". But he watched me to see if I knew what I was doing.
Understand that I had never been in the same room as a keypunch before.
The manual had said the on/off switch was under the table top. I groped around, and suddenly found it. I turned the keypunch on, and the teacher lost interest in me and walked away. Now I could breath.
Sep 30, 2026, 8:16 PMNice one!
Sep 30, 2026, 8:17 PMThe manual even explained how to cut a tab stop card. When inserted into the drum, hitting the tab stop key would advance the card to the next tab stop.
Years later at PoGo, I used this knowledge when a business man in the computer lab offered me some money to punch some cards for him. A tab stop card sped thing up wonderfully.
Sep 30, 2026, 8:38 PM@nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock yes indeed, tabstop cards would do that.
I know their theory but not practically.
After my WATFOR self-study Orono summer of '76 (concurrent w Calc 1), I only ever needed the punch for duplicating a damaged data card or making a //JCL card to name the file the data deck was to load to.
Sep 30, 2026, 8:38 PMOct 1, 2026, 12:47 AMPracticality of using a tab stop card? I seem to remember that when I bothered to make one, it did seem to speed up data entry. Otherwise you are forever carefully counting spaces to ensure that the data values were proprrlyaligned in their columns
Oct 1, 2026, 1:14 AM@nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
Oh yes, that's it to a t.
I never did more than one data card repair on the punch at a time, using DUPlicate for a many columns of bad card were readable.
For that client, if we hand keyed data it was on terminal (double keyed and compared).
Cards were only on mark-sense workflow.
So while I knew about tab control (from typing class obviously useful!) I never used it with punch.
Oct 1, 2026, 1:29 AM@nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
I definitely used tab stops in IBM editors that considered files as virtual card decks.!
@n1vux @nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock I think one of the first ed macros I wrote was to insert a new line followed by 5 spaces and a c. You can probably guess which language I was writing in.
Oct 1, 2026, 1:31 PM@ianturton @nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
Indeed!
Oct 1, 2026, 2:54 PM@ianturton @nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
40ish years ago I was assisting one of my elders (semi famous) with his second ever C program.
I looked it over and asked him if his first language was FORTRAN, as his C had a pronounced 'accent'. (Yes)
I may have avoided the brain damage oft attributed to both BASIC&FORTRAN (a) by the TA teaching flowcharts being clued on evolving Structured Programming (b) by doing both (& FOCAL) in quick succession after reading a PL/I book from remainders pile.
Oct 1, 2026, 2:58 PM@ianturton @nyrath @n1xnx @TerryHancock
I even had one FORTRAN ii program on the DEC EduSystem (after doing WATFOR / WATFIV dialect of Fort iv), the one with the way jump IF (no THEN, let alone ELSE). Weird!
@n1vux @ianturton @nyrath @TerryHancock
When I was a rocket scientist at Panametrics space instruments in the 90s, our program physicist Fred Hanser still maintained a set of FORTRAN programs he used for particle physics calculations. It wasn't that he couldn't have written new ones in a more modern language, it was that they "weren't broke" so he didn't fix them.
Oct 1, 2026, 3:48 PM@n1xnx @n1vux @ianturton @TerryHancock
I have a vague memory that in certain branches of science they rely upon subroutines written in FORTRAN which the scientists are forbidden to edit. Something about rewriting the subroutines in a different language can subtlety change the output past the decimal point.
@nyrath @n1vux @ianturton @TerryHancock
Spot on.
Numeric precision of FORTRAN calculations is, I believe, specified quite tightly. Just assuming that you can map to a 64-bit float and all's well causes subtle but significant things to happen. And if you've built a whole system based on the results the FORTRAN delivers, you're inviting Charlie to dance the Foxtrot.
@n1xnx @nyrath @n1vux @ianturton @TerryHancock When I was at atomic energy of Canada in 2005 as a high school student with the Deep River Science Academy some of our calculations called a FORTRAN77 fluid simulation library that opened with several pages of comments about its certifications and testing.
I imagine once you've spent the money to certify such things, you really don't want to spend it again if the old code still works.
@nyrath @n1xnx @n1vux @ianturton
Yeah, I think Fortran is still king when it comes to pure number-crunching.
@n1vux @ianturton @nyrath @TerryHancock
Fred also had two-foot-high stacks of papers on his desk, and could find EXACTLY the document he needed within those stacks in seconds.
We also had a 20-foot wall shelf we called "the wall of Fred" with nigh onto 100 years pf Physics Review Letters and other journals. He still referred to them, and could likewise immediately find a specific article from 50 years ago that had the calculations he needed.
In a very rare combination with that polymathic genius, Fred was also a fully functional social human being and an extremely nice guy.
@nyrath @n1vux @TerryHancock @n1xnx
I found a Xerox Diablo teletype in the trash out back of a mainframe shop once and convinced my dad to go pick it up (in the sedan) and bring it home. It worked, and it supported 300 baud ("HS" for high speed...) but the Selectric ball was worn out and illegible, and I had no idea where to get a new one. Back to the curb it went...