[GreenKeys] [External] Re: Christmas Decorating with Paper Tape

[Jones, Douglas W]

From:  Duncan Brown [duncanancy at earthlink.net] -- Tuesday, December 20, 2022 4:30 PM
> I almost took a picture of our tree at the AWA Museum last week.

This reminds me of a story from December 1968, when I was a student at Ann Arbor High School, taking a course they called Computer Math.  We had three Teletype model 33 ASR machines that the class shared.  One had a phone line to access the timesharing system we used, the other two were for preparing paper tapes, so two students could prepare tapes while one was actually accessing the computer.  Great fun.  The remote computer was an Scientific Data Systems 940 owned by Com Share, Inc., a single-accumulator machine with a 24-bit word, virtual memory, and a really neat operating system.

Anyway, as Christmas approached, a file showed up on the machine with the suggestion that you punch it on paper tape.  It was gibberish, as ASCII text, but when punched on tape, you got very readable block print, with a line of sprocket holes through the text.  The punched tape said:

   MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM SDS

Well, neat, we students thought, and began duplicating the tape on the local-mode TTYs.  We festooned bulletin boards around the school with the tapes.

This caused considerable consternation, because in the public mind, at that time, SDS stood for Students for a Democratic Society, an organization viewed by much of the public as very much radical revolutionary leftist, and indeed, there had been attempts by that SDS to recruit high school students in town.

          Doug Jones
          jones at cs.uiowa.edu