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The Laptop, Circa 1968
Harry writes "In 1968, computers tended to occupy entire rooms, and were therefore hard to take with you. But Computerworld reports on Anderson Jacobson's 75-pound Teletype-terminal-in-a-case, an early attempt to let folks compute from anywhere. (Well, anywhere they had power and access to a telephone for the Teletype's acoustic coupler.) Wheels were optional."
They don't really call it a laptop, they use 'laptop' to draw a comparison between the somewhat portable teletype and modern portable computers.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
An ASR-33 is 110 baud.
Um, yeah, that "progress" was called the microchip.
Yes, what I think a lot of people may have failed to realise with the ASR-33 is that it's all mechanical. The only electrical part is the solenoid that flips some pins sticking out of the shifter drum back and forwards.
When you press a key, the keypress is turned into a stream of data by a mechanical shifter. When you receive a character, the serial data is unshifted and printed by a mechanical shifter. No electronics to be found at all.
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital. It would just be discrete parts, such as the 7400 series invented in 1964 -- with no microprocessors or any other chip with more than a handful of gates.
Let's not go overboard. The modem is electronic. It is almost certainly also digital.
Early FSK modems, below 1200 baud, were analog devices. The output side was just an oscillator switched between two frequencies, and the input side was a pair of filters. This was a version of the technology used for radioteletype (RTTY), where it had often been implemented with tubes. (There are some very retro radio hams still using all-tube demodulators with mechanical teletypes.)
At 1200 baud and above, modem technology changed drastically, and digital components appeared. But modems were still mostly analog devices until DSP-based modems became economically feasible in the 1980s.
and I have a box of it in my workshop. It's all on paper tape. You'd print out the tape on the teletype and a picture of a naked lady would appear after several minutes. Google TTY art and you'll see what it looks like.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Tee hee. My dad used one of these for astronomy computations - they gave a bunch of them to universities in the early seventies, as they were hopelessly obsolete by then. And he used a teletype. Here's a photo of another common computer he used, the Nova.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Yes - the excact same mecahnism, actually: It was a current-loop - if current flowed it was a 0, if it stopped, it was a 1! (In some cases, it was +/- current, and in other cases it was 15mA for 1 and 4mA for 0. There were probably several other "standards" as well.)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII