Steve Dix...Comedian?

Raptus Regaliter

It's not just the times, it's the species.


09.11.2004 17:46 - The ASR 33 Teletype

Way back in the late 1970\'s, I learned to program.  The way we learned to program was largely on mark-sense cards.  These were exactly the same as punchcards, except that instead of making holes in them, you marked a box with a pencil, rather like modern multiple-choice test papers.  These were then sent to the local polytechnic, and back came the line-printer output the next week.  I lost count of how many times some idiot would use a pen, wait a whole week and get no output.  It taught me a lot of discipline that seems to be non-existent in most modern programmers.  That weekly collection was the only chance you got, so you had to make sure that your program was correct and would run.   You would then have to painstakingly encode it with a pencil on the cards.  One mistake and that was it for the week.

If you were lucky, you would be allowed to use the terminal that was brought, once a week, again from the local polytechnic.  This was a monstrous electromechanical teletype which would be connected to a giant, suitcase-sized acoustic coupler of a modem that would run at 9600 baud.  I was one of the few people who could get it to work, and every Wednesday afternoon I would be constantly dragged out of lessons to restart the connection.

The ASR33 teletype was also the terminal of choice when I went to a computing course at the local college.  There were about eight of the things all in one room, all connected up to a Honeywell GCOS minicomputer (GCOS was very similar to unix).  I\'m fairly sure that sitting in that room with all those teletypes going damaged my hearing.  The ASR33 was not a quiet machine, and was driven by large electric motors.  Even at rest it whirred loudly.  Printing out something was likely to cause severe vibration, and, if the machine was not suitably secured, it would dance off in the same way a washing machine does on full spin cycle.  When the print head carriage returned, you knew it, because it would shoot back across the platten and meet the casing with a resounding \"WHACK!\".  Typing on the thing was by no means the quiet rattle that it is today.  Each key required considerable force to press, and when pressed, emitted a sound similar to an air-ratchet - sort of \"Peeee-YEUUCH!\".  Touch-typing was difficult, but I did manage it, and it was noisy.  I was asked by a technician not to do it again.  I didn\'t want to, as prolonged operation of an ASR33 was a very good way to get RSI.  Even sitting with your hands resting on one whilst it was switched on would soon have a numbing effect due to the vibration.  As for lower case, most of them couldn\'t do that.  You were stuck with upper case and that was it.

You can hear a bit of what an ASR33 sounded like if you listen to Eddie the Computer in \"Hitch-Hikers guide to the galaxy\".  That rattling sound behind him is an ASR33 teletype in full swing.  Imagine six of them on the go all at the same time.  That was the noise I had to put up with when learning to program.  In a line editor.  No screen editors for you on an ASR33.

Fortunately for me, the ASR33\'s days were numbered even as I encountered the beast.  The microcomputer caught on in a big way, and schools up and down the country gratefully threw aside the old chugging wrecks in favour of them.  First the dedicated video terminals caught on, and then someone realised a PC with a terminal emulation program cost a lot less than a dedicated terminal.  Nowadays people moan if the network\'s running a bit slow or if they have to walk to the printer to put paper in it.  I wonder what they\'d say if they were forced to hand-code it on card and submit it on a strict rota?


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