
Home Terminals (1999) - ecliptik
https://www.multicians.org/terminals.html
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russellbeattie
For years, I could never understand what was special about vi, in that it was
short for "visual". What was particularly visual about it? I also couldn't
grasp the idea of "line editors" like ex and ed that came before it... How
would that even work? Why one line at a time? Memory?

Then one day I saw the famous picture of Gates and Allen at a teletype
terminal for the 100th time, and it suddenly hit me. Oh! It was all printed
out!! So as you were writing your program, it was being typed out on paper in
front of you. Then you'd read the paper (maybe after a few lines) if you saw
some errors, then you would use ed or ex to edit the program by entering the
line number the replacement text. You'd do that a few times, then run the
program again, or print it all out again to double your fixes. Ex would make
that a lot easier than ed by allowing regular expressions, etc.

So vi is a visual on-screen version for a monitor terminal. Duh! Took me years
and years to grok this simple concept.

~~~
cbm-vic-20
If teletypes seem clunky and primitive, remember this is still miles ahead of
the previous computer programming interface: punch cards. TTYs allowed real-
time interactive use of the computer. Even if only one line at a time.

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jakecopp
> When the Big Snow of 1978 hit, it came with plenty of warning. So I took two
> cases of my favorite beer and a full box of terminal paper home, and
> reminded the MIT operators to set the Multics machine for unattended reboot.
> The blizzard paralyzed the Boston area for a week, but I was able to work.
> The MIT Multics had only a few users logged in, and response was great.

This made me smile!

------
n4r9
> The first people to have home terminals were those system programmers who
> might be called at any hour to investigate or repair a problem with the
> time-sharing system. These folks took home a machine that might cost as much
> as half a year's salary, and had a leased phone line connected to the MIT
> data PBX installed at home. They discovered that having a machine at home
> was useful not only for fixing the operating system, but also for
> programming and writing documents from home, and for sending electronic mail
> to other users on the MIT system.

Imagine being one of the first people in the world to discover that you could
sit at home and tap out messages to other people sitting at home, who'd pick
them up instantly (or at their leisure).

~~~
jakecopp
I wonder what things are just happening now that are the equivalent; the first
people to experience something that will be so commonplace and useful.

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jakedata
I fished a DEC printing terminal and 300 baud modem out of a dumpster and got
it all working again in the mid 80s. Obsoletely fabulous for dialing up the
Northern Lights BBS and it prepared me for other exciting developments in IT.

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kristianp
I can see the motivation for APL in these slow terminals. It's surprising how
long it took for screen-based terminals to appear, not until the early 80's,
more than a decade after the first teletype ones.

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jonjacky
Around 1980, our department shared a portable printing terminal with a built-
in modem, called by its manufacturer the "Silent 700". A friend observed,
"It's silent when it's off."

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dang
[https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multi...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990422131909/https://www.multicians.org/terminals.html)
looks the same, so I switched 2001 to 1999 above. It could of course go back
earlier.

