Folk keyboard 746
Since you're sending this on alt.foklore.computers instead of alt.english.literature, I'd say these are BAD examples. Try your...
I must remind the original poster that the vast majority of the world's computers; somewhere between 98% and 99.8%, are programmed in binary...
Dennis Ritchie
The evolution and pricing of terminals goes along with the use of micros in the '70s. At the start the only thing available was the 33, with a practical life of one year if you were lucky. Then we got such things as the silent 700s from TI, which got up to the fantastically speedy rate of 300 baud, allowed backspacing and lower case, and lasted over a year. They also cost less, but the paper was another story. We could hide that in other accounts though. Then we got the glbutt teletypes, which evolved into things with full upper-lower case, high speeds such as 2400 baud, and might have a 6502 powering them. To that we could add the first Epson MX80 printers, which were actually reliable, and relatively speedy. This only left the paper tape recording and storage facility of the 33s missing, which was soon filled by floppy disks.
Yup. I remember that one but never used it. When I started working in Tape Prep, 1971, there was a gal working with man's name just fell...
So by about 1978 we had replaced the 33 with a CRT, micro running CP-M, an Epson, and a dual floppy system, for about the same cost as a 37 of 1970, with at least an order of magnitude improvement in speed, reliability and flexibility. Since then we have just been repacking the same system, with speed and capacity improvements, and the hard copy (printing) portion has remained separate.
Since then everything apart from the printer and CRT has become much smaller. Now LCDs are making inroads on the displays, but that can only go so far because the ultimate interface has to be to the Mark I eyeball.
The real changes occurred in the '70s, but we didn't know it. This was also the era of the rise of real languages, such as C and Pascal, and of Unix, and of real silicon technology. A goodly proportion of the people who did all that are present right here in A.F.C. I think the '70s were the 1848 of the electronics and computing world.
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From the 704 manual on www.bitsavers.org, pp. 7-8: The two principal clbuttes of instructions are referred to as Types A and B. Figure 4 shows the form of a Type A...
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