[GreenKeys] [External] That SDS-branded Teletype Model 35 in LA area - anyone want it?

[Jones, Douglas W]

From: B Degnan via GreenKeys [greenkeys at mailman.qth.net] -- Wednesday, August 19, 2020 8:57 AM

>  The Pedestal is branded SDS, as in the old Sigma S7 computer.  Xerox bought them out and sold the Sigma afterwards.

That brings back memories.  I took my first programming course at Ann Arbor High (soon to become Ann Arbor Pioneer High), we had two Teletype 33s, one for off-line paper-tape preparation, one connected to remote SDS 940 providing time-sharing service sold by Com Share Inc.  That was back in the day that the Students for a Democratic Society were in the news, so outside our computer class, the initials SDS had a very distinctive and dangerous connotation.  So, around Christmas time, someone at SDS created a file you could punch on your papr-tape punch that created dot-matrix text on the paper tape saying MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM SDS.  We gleefully punched this file and posted the tapes on random bulletin boards around the school, causing considerable consternation.

In fact, not long after that, news stories began cropping up that the Students for a Democratic Society were recruiting on the high-school campus.  We might have been the source of that rumor, for all I know.

Anyway, a few years later, in the summer of 1972, I got my first programming job at Com Share.  At the time, they owned about 1/3 of the entire production run of SDS-940 systems, while TymShare Inc owned most of the rest.  At the time, ComShare was migrating their customer base to XDS Sigma 7 sytems  (the Xerox successor to the 940 and an excellent competitor for the IBM 370).  It was not yet clear that Xerox was going to ruin XDS by a complete failure to understand the computer marketplace.  They did the same thing again 8 years later when they completely fumbled the idea of windows on a desktop workstation.  I had a beautiful inside view of that fumble when I interviewed with Xerox in 1980.  The book about their fumble is called Fumbling the Future.

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu