jaw@aurora.UUCP (James A. Woods) (11/21/86)
# [talking about building a seven-day disappearer ....] "Yes, said Willy McGilly. Who would've thought you could do it with a beer can and two pieces of cardboard? When I was a boy, I used an oatmeal box and a red crayola." -- Raphael Aloysius Lafferty, from "Seven-Day Terror", in '900 Grandmothers' >> > the most brain-damaged terminal I have ever seen! >> > Can any terminal be dumber than this one??? >> >> How old are you, Sonny? You been spoon fed all your life? Used to be this >> was a dandy relief from the ASR-33. Guess some people are just plain spoiled. > > Wellll, Grampa, I am old enough that once upon a time I interfaced > a Cubic Corp. _electromechanical_ digital voltmeter to a 28-RO page printer > by using an arrangement of 22-position stepping relays to actually generate > the necessary Baudot codes for the 28-RO. ... heavens to betsy -- emeritus math prof. derrick h. lehmer at u.c. berkeley has you all beat. when they unplugged the old 7090 supercomputer to make way for the ginormus cdc 6400 in campbell hall, they gave him the ibm clunker to play with, sans printer, card reader or console tty. merrily he programmed away, flipping the toggle switches and setting address stops for "I", and reading the binary cpu lights for "O". he didn't need no steeenking terminal. but then, as an expert patch cord programmer from whirlwind days, it was no big deal. d.h.l. did the linear congruential random # generator (r.i.p.) this way, i believe. yo, but derrick henry's old man (derrick norman) grew up calculating prime numbers using bicycle wheels and flashlight beams. some folks are just "born to compute"... --j. alien p.s. sure, some of you young whippersnappers did the same thing with your altair. and while we're on the subject of microcomputers setting computer science back twenty years (dijkstra was right!), the bendix g-15 "walkthrough" machine was an aesthetic to behold. p.p.s. remember, kids, if your story is > 15 years old, it's eligible for the afips "annals of the history of computing" journal. right about now, it should be time for the tom ferrin "trace-cut-on-pdp-11/70-backplane-to-make-nargs()-work-right" story.