Shortly after I got to college, they replaced the PDP-11/34 running 7th Edition Unix with a Vax-11/750 running BSD4.2 ... And we all logged in with various terminals (mostly VT100 clones, though if we were crowded, you might get stuck using one of the DecWriter paper terminals).
There were a couple actual IBM PC's (not XT's but the plain-old dual-floppy PC, with DOS 1.1) which you could sign up for, in the library.
I've used DECwriter IIIs "in anger"; the computer center still had a bunch of them along with the VT220s and IBM 3278s when I started at school. As one of the few who could usefully use a line editor, I could follow the true path and still work with my files.
I do like having a PDA faster than just about anything I had access to in college (though it doesn't have the I/O capacity of the IBM 3090).
All this talk of terminals! We didn't have terminals. We had keypunch machines! And our output was printouts, on wide, green-bar paper. (Or more punched cards.) No pretty displays. Calling dibs on a Sun 3/60? We'd have thought it was the blessed afterlife, or a very positive reincarnation.
And after college, when we did get terminals, they weren't those new-fangled VT-100s. Lear Siegler! ADM-5, ADM-11! Yeah, you remember seeing those strange names in the termcap file. (They're still in there.) Ever wonder about vi's cursor-motion commands (hjkl)? They match the arrow keys on the old terminals.
And d'Glenn's already heard my stories about the computer in High School (and a computer in a high school was a very rare thing in those days) where we marked our punch cards with soft-lead pencils (we didn't even have a keypunch), and everything else was on paper tape....
(no subject)
Young'uns these days!
Shortly after I got to college, they replaced the PDP-11/34 running 7th Edition Unix with a Vax-11/750 running BSD4.2 ... And we all logged in with various terminals (mostly VT100 clones, though if we were crowded, you might get stuck using one of the DecWriter paper terminals).
There were a couple actual IBM PC's (not XT's but the plain-old dual-floppy PC, with DOS 1.1) which you could sign up for, in the library.
Re: Young'uns these days!
I do like having a PDA faster than just about anything I had access to in college (though it doesn't have the I/O capacity of the IBM 3090).
Re: Young'uns these days!
All this talk of terminals! We didn't have terminals. We had keypunch machines! And our output was printouts, on wide, green-bar paper. (Or more punched cards.) No pretty displays. Calling dibs on a Sun 3/60? We'd have thought it was the blessed afterlife, or a very positive reincarnation.
And after college, when we did get terminals, they weren't those new-fangled VT-100s. Lear Siegler! ADM-5, ADM-11! Yeah, you remember seeing those strange names in the termcap file. (They're still in there.) Ever wonder about vi's cursor-motion commands (hjkl)? They match the arrow keys on the old terminals.
And d'Glenn's already heard my stories about the computer in High School (and a computer in a high school was a very rare thing in those days) where we marked our punch cards with soft-lead pencils (we didn't even have a keypunch), and everything else was on paper tape....