Post #1444953

2026-03-08 02:31 UTC

@djl Lucky you; I went through teletypes, and then glass terminals lacking cursor control, before finally being in an environment with cursor control terminals capable of WYSIWYG -- and at that, it was pretty random back then who had heard the pro-WYSIWYG arguments and who had not, so... @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot

Replies (3)

@kentpitman@climatejustice.social 2026-03-08 02:43

@dougmerritt @djl @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot For those looking on who might not know these terms, teletypes had paper feeding through and mostly did only output that was left-to-right and then fed that line and then did not back up ever to a previous line. They were also loud and clunky, mostly, and had keyboards that had keys you had to press way down in order to get them to take. Glass terminals were displays that could only do output to the bottom line of the screen, kind of like a paper terminal but without the paper. Once it scrolled up, you couldn't generally scroll back down. But that's why it might sound like it would have cursor control but did not yet.

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@djl@mastodon.mit.edu 2026-03-08 02:46

@dougmerritt @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot Yes. I missed the teletype round. Sort of. Father was site engineer for one of the early LINC 8 installations, and later a PDP-7 installation, and they had teletypes. They.Were.Horrid. Peter Belmont (later Ada developer) tried to persuade me to do programming, but I was busy doing other things. The IBM card puches had really sweet keyboards, though.

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@djl@mastodon.mit.edu 2026-03-08 03:05

@dougmerritt @kentpitman @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot I've been through 17 or so environments, and I was always able to find an editor that could be persuaded to act the way I wanted: CCA, NEC, AT&T and even Word for MS-DOS. Hilariously, Word for Windows defeated me. There was no way to persuade it to act as a civilized text editor, so I acquired the source code to WordPad and implemented my usual TECO macros in C++, and used that for 20 years or so.

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