technical question

Tony Arnold tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk
Mon May 23 10:50:26 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 21:49 +1200, Jim Cheetham wrote:

> Literally, teletype - one of those old devices with a keyboard and a 
> roll of printer paper. They used to be the basic method of talking to a 
> computer - noisy too, which is probably why so many unix commands drop 
> their vowels and are as short as possible :-)

Not so much because of the noise, more because it was difficult to type
at any real speed on these things. The old ASR-33 teletype was a
mechanical marvel, but the travel on the keys when you pressed them was
huge by today's standards, and stiff. Also, the things communicated with
the computer at 330 baud, yes just 33 characters per second!

We also had one that caught fire, but that's another story!

Ah, nostalgia! It ain't what it used to be:-)

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
Manchester Computing, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold






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