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!
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....