Flashback To My Childhood

Something you often see in offices of computer companies is a "museum exhibit." The first one I remember was at the old ComputerLand store in Metairie, LA. When one of the very first IBM PCs they leased came back five years later, they put it out in the reception area, listing what $10,000 bought you at that time. I've always said I'll put out my TRS-80 Model I if I ever have a public office.

At COMMAX in Oslo, Norway, the "museum exhibit" is a teletype, very similar to the model I used as a high school kid learning what computers were all about.

Back in January of 1972, Bro. Neal Golden, SC, invited a bunch of 8th graders at Brother Martin High School to join the Academic Games team and play the game Equations. I was one of the group, and we used a small seminar-style conference room in the school's upstairs Resource Center as our practice location. In the corner of that room stood a teletype that was used by the Computer Science students to do their class assignments. Since we 8th graders had a natural curiosity about computers, and since Brother Neal was writing a book on the BASIC programming language, he allowed us to learn some programming as well. The Academic Games kids were his beta-test group for the lab exercises in the book.

The teletype was connected to the outside world via an acoustic coupler modem. These were the days of rotary-dial phones, so you would dial a number, then when you heard the carrier tone from the other side, you put the phone's handset into the acoustic coupler, and the two systems would "talk" over the phone line. Initially, the teletype was connected to a DECSystem 10 owned by a private company, but Brother Neal later worked out a deal with Technical Associates of New Orleans (TANO) to use their DEC PDP-11 midrange system. We paid a flat fee, dialed a local phone number, and could do just about anything we wanted on that system.  Since it was time-consuming to type in an entire program in real time, we would set the teletype in "off-line" mode and type out our programs, saving them on pink punch-tape.  The photo above is of the teletype's punch-tape reader.  Once you finished creating the tape of your program, you then dialed up the computer and fed the paper tape into the reader, uploading your work. You could then make any last-minute changes to the program, run it, gather the printed output, and give it to Brother Neal for his review.

When we had access to the local computer, we were able to do more real-time work.  That's where I learned to appreciate Digital hardware and their operating systems. 

Anyway, blessings to Brother Neal for starting me down this path, and thanks to COMMAX for triggering such great memories.