[GreenKeys] Honorary Teletype usage

[Chuck Rehor]

That is a fantastic story!!!!!!!!!

I can’t believe you still have access to a punch card puncher.

The paper tape and Chad were a nice touch, too!

Chuck W9CFR

On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 3:16 PM Jones, Douglas W via GreenKeys <
greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:

> At the U of Iowa, we just gave an honorary degree, and Teletypes played a
> part.
>
> In the mid 1960s, a new graduate student came to the new computer science
> department at the University of Iowa, Bill Decker.  He was one of the first
> to get a masters from the department, and he went on to a long career
> starting at the University's computer center, then directing the computer
> science department's lab.  Eventually, he served as acting vice president
> for research before leaving to become the program director for networking
> at the National Science Foundation, where he oversaw what came to be known
> as Internet II.  Quite a career for someone with just a masters degree.
>
> So the CS department nominated Bill for an honorary doctorate, and our
> nomination was accepted.  Of course, they dressed him up in cap and gown
> and gave him a sheepskin, but after the official ceremony, we held a
> reception.  One of the high point of the speeches at the reception was when
> I handed him:
>
> 14 punched cards, enough to hold 1.12 kilobytes using Hollerith encoding.
>    10 of the 14 cards were University of Iowa cards.
> 2 paper tapes, freshly punched on a Model 33, one on yellow tape, one on
> black
>    (those being the university colors as well as the only two colors of
> paper tape I have).
> A sealed ziplock bag of chad, black and yellow,
>    including chad from the punching of those tapes.
> A slip of paper torn off from the Teletype holding the text contained on
> those tapes.
>
> Each tape held 4 copies of this text with ample leader between:
>         DR. WILLIAM F. DECKER, DSC.  MAY 11, 2024, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
>
> Bill choked up when I gave him the tapes and the torn off Teletype
> listing, and he cracked up when I handed him the baggie of chad.
>
> Since I didn't include any linefeeds in the message, but put a carriage
> return out in the middle of the leader, the printed version represented
> about 8 overprints of the same text, making it nice and dark despite the
> rather anemic ribbon I used.  Of course, I only typed the first copy, then
> fed it through the reader and let the Teletype duplicate it.
>
>          Doug Jones
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