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The Laptop, Circa 1968

Posted by timothy on from the some-turtles-have-nice-shells dept.

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."

8 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Once upon a time by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Once I was talking to my grandpa about old computers, and I mentioned that my C64 had a slow 300 baud modem. He used to work on these mainframes, and he came right back and said, "the first modem I had was 9 baud." The article doesn't say how fast their modem is, but from the picture 9 baud is about right.

    Just for comparison, 300 baud is so slow that you can read the text faster than it downloads. That teletype is honestly not the most convenient device.

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    Qxe4
    1. Re:Once upon a time by a2wflc · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'd trade my current 6MB connection and today's web sites, email, blogs, etc for the 300 baud modem I had in the 70s/80s and the BBSs, news groups, talk/chat, and useful information on the other end.

      People knew how to put lots of information in a few sentences or at most a couple of paragraphs. I may have seen the info show up slowly, 1 character at a time, but after 30-60 seconds I had what I want. Now I have megabytes show up in seconds, but it may take minutes to find the useful information (if useful information is even there)

    2. Re:Once upon a time by lpress · · Score: 3, Interesting
      > The article doesn't say how fast their modem is

      It was 10 characters or 110 bits per second. You could read a lot faster than it could print and it only did upper case.

      The Teletype was fully mechanical, so you could really understand how it worked and even repair it yourself. They sold cool, reasonably priced tool kits and parts were available.

      Anderson Jacobson just packaged a standard Teletype with an accoustical coupler in a huge fiberglass case with casters. I had one of those and got four fixed units on stands to install in the public library in Venice, CA. Teletypes were common timesharing terminals -- we had a room full of them at SDC that were tied into the Q-32 timesharing system.

      Larry

  2. Re:Aristotle by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...Or they didn't move as much. I don't think this was carried around in the way that a laptop was but rather this was (for the time) a lighter alternative to a desktop, similar to the mini-PCs today like the Mac Mini.

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    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  3. Portables vs. Transportables by alewar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For me anything bigger than 13' isn't portable, but "transportable".

  4. 1976 TI Silent 700 Terminal - $1995, 13 lbs. by theodp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    TI Silent 700 Ad: See how much progress was made in 8 years? :-)

  5. I used one of these... by veryoldgeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...or something very similar. I got my start in computing 40 years ago on a "portable" Teletype with an acoustic coupler, dialed into a GE timesharing system from home. The teletype had a tape punch/reader, so I could write programs off-line. I believe the modem ran at about 110 baud. I programmed in BASIC--the real Kemeny and Kurtz variety, not the stripped-down variety that showed up 10 years later on the first personal computers. (Yes, I'm a bit above the median age for slashdot readers.)

  6. I used one of those by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We had one of those at Sperry Vickers (Troy, Michigan) in 1971, with the acoustic coupler in the wooden case. Even then, it was on the way out; we were moving to Uniscope CRT terminals and UNIVAC DCT 300 printers, connected to a UNIVAC 1108 computer.

    Power was supplied to the modem as 120 VAC over otherwise-unused pins in the DB-25 connector from the Teletype Model 33 ASR.

    Things were really clunky back then. We still had a full set of mechanical Remington Rand 90-column card gear, programmed by wiring up "connection boxes", mechanical plugboards which used flexible cables like bike brake cables to transmit data from input to output. That, too, was on the way out, but it was still used for a few jobs.