[GreenKeys] What brought you here?

[Jones, Douglas W]

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My first contact with a Teletype was in 1968, when my highschool offered a course called "computer math". We had two 33 ASR teletypes and one modem shared by about 15 students, although it wasn't long before we got a second off-line 33 so two students could punch tape while one actually had access to the remote computer.  The computer was an SDS-940 owned by ComShare Inc in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  We learned CAL (the California Algorithmic Language, sort of like BASIC), then a bit of FORTRAN II, then a bit of assembly language.

In college, at Carnegie-Mellon University, I took a step back and used punched cards for two years until some upper level courses were we used Teletypes or IBM 2741 (Selectrics) as terminals.  There, some of the machines were model 33s, but others were 35s.  I really liked the way the type-box in the 35 worked.  We used all of them as terminals to the IBM 360/67 running TSS/360, a great system, although IBM never got it working -- Carnegie-Mellon sued, and IBM gave them the source code to settle the case.  Carnegie-Mellon's CS department then got it working.  Worked pretty well, too.

I had a summer job at ComShare in the summer of 1972.  There again, the terminal room was full of 33s, with a few Tektronix graphics terminals, brand new storage-tube devices.  One was bizarrely defective and managed to transpose two fields of the screen, almost certainly an address bit was miswired somewhere inside.

For the summers of 1973 and 1974, I had a co-op job (of sorts) at Bell Labs Murray Hill.  There, the central computer system had a mix of Teletypes and GE Terminet 300 printers (300 baud!) connected to a Honeywell 6000 computer running GCOS (the former General Electric Comprehensive Operating System - Honeywell dropped the E when they bought GE's computer division).  The lab I worked in (Department 1227, Acoustics Research) had a local area network of Honeywell 516 workstations, each with a mouse, a display screen, a teletype model 33, a card reader, and a high-speed papere-tape reader).  One machine on the network had a Teletype Inktronic ink-jet printer.  It worked at 9600 baud, great, but in addition to the ink that it intended to print onto the page, it tended to leave a scattering of little globs of purple ink that would get all over your hands and smear the printed pages when you handled the paper fresh off the printer.

In grad school at the U of Illinois starting in 1973, it was back to punched cards for several classes, but then, I got involved with the PLATO IV system, where we used flat-panel plasma-display terminals (weird things, with 3 6-bit characters or 2 9-bit coordinates packed into each 21-bit packet transmitted to the terminal.  The project I worked on was not part of PLATO, in fact, we ported the TUTOR programming language from PLATO to the 16/32-bit MODCOMP-IV computer.  For that, I ended up writing the code for an Altair-8800-based protocol converter that supported up to 4 PLATO-IV terminals at 9600 baud, speaking ASCII to the MODCOMP.  I also wrote a code converter to convert PLATO character codes to IBM's Word Processing EBCDIC, and built hardware to allow a GE Terminet-600 to be hooked to a PLATO-IV terminal.

Then, totally away from hardware and Teletypeland until I started picking up and trying to restore bits of PDP-8 equipment here at the University of Iowa

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu