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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:32 AM

    I had to include "Adventure". It was one of my first experiences with any kind of computer. I actually played it on a teletype, with one of those 300 baud dial-in modems with the cradle for the handset.

    My uncle, who worked as a programmer in the early 1970s brought the teletype to my parents' house, and this was one of the things we did (there was also "Star Trek", which was kind of like Battleship -- you can still find it in Linux distributions to play on the console), and ASCII art.

    This was a time when kids did not normally have childhood experiences interacting with a computer -- which seems hard to imagine today, but it was true.

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Replies

  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:53 AM

    For the young 'uns, this is what a "teletype" looks like of about that era (it's not the right model -- my uncle's was a portable that came in a big suitcase -- I don't remember more than that).

    A "Decwriter" -- a 1970s teletype. Couldn't find a portable model that looked like I remember,. But it was similar to this. There is no screen -- you type in commands and it types out responses from the computer. On paper.
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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Sep 29, 2026, 10:29 AM

    @TerryHancock

    That'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.

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  • Space Catitude 🚀TerryHancock@realsocial.life
    Sep 29, 2026, 3:20 PM

    @nyrath

    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!

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    Sep 30, 2026, 3:17 AM

    @nyrath @TerryHancock

    if 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

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  • Steve Herseyn1xnx@tilde.zone
    Sep 30, 2026, 11:48 AM

    @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.

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    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!

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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Sep 30, 2026, 7:57 PM

    @n1vux @n1xnx @TerryHancock

    The 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.

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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Sep 30, 2026, 8:10 PM

    @n1vux @n1xnx @TerryHancock

    I 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.

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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Sep 30, 2026, 8:17 PM

    @n1vux @n1xnx @TerryHancock

    The 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.

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    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.

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    Sep 30, 2026, 8:38 PM

    @nyrath @n1xnx
    (Actual processing jobs were queued from terminals, but the marksense emitted cards, which i sorted on the sorter offline before loading to disk, since i cost less than the mainframes, per hour.)

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  • Winchell Chung ⚛🚀nyrath@spacey.space
    Oct 1, 2026, 12:47 AM

    @n1vux @n1xnx @TerryHancock

    Practicality 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

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    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.

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  • Bill Rickern1vux@mastodon.radio
    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.

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