Post #1444954

2026-03-08 02:43 UTC

@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.

Replies (2)

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-08 02:47

@kentpitman Yes, and to clarify your final two sentences, the *display* scrolled up with each additional line emitted -- the *cursor* could never scroll up. In my environment at Berkeley, these were Lear Siegler ADM 3 terminals. The slightly later ADM 3a terminals finally allowed the cursor to be moved around at will (although they didn't have any fancier abilities, unlike still later devices). Thanks for thinking to explain what I did not. @djl @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot

Open ##1444955
@djl@mastodon.mit.edu 2026-03-08 02:54

@kentpitman @dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot The datapoint terminals were _almost_ wysiwyg: they didn't have a cursor, so the TECO of the time inserted "/\" in the text displayed, and you could insert text there, delete the next character and the like. But TECO allowed you to change the "/\" to whatever you liked, so if you left your terminal, someone would change that to "/\Foo is loser" and Foo wouldn't be able to delete that text from Foo's file...

Open ##1444956