[GreenKeys] Teletypes in Portal 2

[Jordan Spencer Cunningham]

I don't play video games very often, but when I do, I'm usually sick;
that's the only time I'm too physically incapacitated to do much else and
thus don't feel under pressure to get everything on my ever growing to-do
list done.

I happened to fall ill the other day and decided to play Portal 2 for the
first time. It's a very interesting storyline as far as games go, but what
surprised me is that I found some teletypes in the bottommost condemned
testing area (circa ~1950s), four or five kilometers below the Earth's
surface. For the uninitiated, I've attached a screenshot.

The closer to the surface you go, the newer the testing facilities are, and
the newer the technology in them becomes. Teletypes morphed into giant
mainframes with amber CRT terminals, which morphed into Apple ][-like
desktop computers with what appear to be 5-1/4-inch floppy drives. It's
always fun to see old technology portrayed in modern popular culture, even
if it's inaccurate or completely made up. Most players I'm sure have no
clue what these are, nor do they care. Those darn millennials [shakes cane
at passers by].

The game designers either didn't realize or didn't care that they only put
20 keys on their teletype model. I won't say I know for sure that there's
never been such a thing, but I highly doubt it. I can't think of a reason
for only twenty keys because even the languages with unusually few letters
that I know of (like Hawaiian or Tagalog) still use Latin characters, which
would work just fine on any common machine with Latin characters.

Anyway, I thought this was interesting enough to share.
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