In the early '70s when I was an engineering student at the
Indianapolis campus of Purdue University, I picked up fer cheep an
ex-TWX machine just like this one. I used it to dial in via
phone line to the DEC 10 computers at the university computing
center to do computer science and engineering homework. At the
time, there were groups of 33ASRs at various places on campus for
student use, but you had to wait around a good while for a
terminal to free up. But we thought we'd died and gone to heaven
when we no longer had to use keypunch machines, could load
programs from paper tape, and receive "instant" results. So I
felt especially fortunate to have my own machine at home. The
center pedestal contained a standard Bell modem, plus a morass of
relay logic, the details of which I never learned. The machine
was connected directly to the phone line (not by acoustic
coupler).
The TTYs were eventually replaced with DECwriters, and a few years later I gave away the Model 33...
73,
John K9WT