My first computer printer was a #Teletype 33 which I could barely pick up, as it was a big beast made almost entirely of metal. And not flimsy metal, this thing could have taken a bullet and not flinched.
Printing was at an incredible - very noisy - 3ish characters per second, and all UPPER CASE!
Here's @rzolau metering to get a beautiful photo of some 1970s #terminal gear in my #University office. We're working on a super fun project to capture some of my #retrocomputing and #VintageRadio hardware. Here he's using period-correct #MediumFormat#film equipment to set up the (unstaged, ambient light) shot while a #Teletype Model 28 KSR photobombs the #Hasselblad camera.
A couple of PDP-11s and a VT-105 terminal (with photobomb by Model 28 #Teletype gear) to brighten your evening.
This is shortly after I got a #pdp11 online; at this point, one of the two RX02 drives worked reliably, the RL01 and RL02 were good, and I thought the CPU and backplane was in good shape (I later learned there was a NPR chain problem on RX211backplane slot), and a lot of software ran correctly.
The rack on the right is … not suitable for this use.
This is your periodic reminder that the Model 33 #Teletype – the device on which #Unix and the C programming language were largely developed – HAS NO CURLY BRACKETS.
The pictured source code is printed on a Model 35 Teletype, which is a different mechanism but uses the same ASCII '63 character set. Note that the Unix TTY driver (V6, in this case) knows this, and prints { and } as ( and ), respectively.
Somehow I never learned this in DECADES of learning about early Unix.
A student just pointed out that a hackathon talk about text slicing and dicing at the #Unix prompt that I gave way back during lockdown days is still available online. It may be of interest to people who want to expand their repertoire of command-line ideas for processing data. There's a cameo by a #PDP11, an #Osborne1, a #Teletype, some floppy disks, and the usual detritus found around my basement, as well.