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....
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....