Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Parkinson
Back in the late '70s when VT100s first came out the IT shop I was working at got one (yes, just one, it was a Big Deal). I insisted it lived on my desk. I was building a system that did (gasp!) direct addressing on the screen, so it built a kind of form for the users to fill in instead of just scrolling up with another prompt. My argument was that I simply could not work without that screen. Up until then we all went to the lineflo terminals (dot matrix printer with a keyboard, for you kids) and did all our coding and testing there. There was about one of those to four programmers so we spent most of the time at our desks 'desk checking' our code.
But that VT100 brought in an whole new era, for me anyway. It only took a few months before everyone else in the office had one.
That was on a PDP-11 running RSTS. When the Vax arrived we could forget about shuffling memory around all the time, the 32 bit memory space felt like infinity. When the 16 bit PCs came out it felt like (and was) a backward step. I avoided them for years 'cos I had a Vax to play with.
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Yes but just one of those VT 100 dumb terminals cost as much as a whole 16 bit PC including monitor and keyboard, and that's not counting the air conditioned, Halon protected room full of PDP-11/Vax. And the PC had RSTS/VMS/DEC Basic emulators so you could write code on them, and then transfer it to the mini for compile.
Oh yeah, they also had VT-100 emulators so you could log onto the PDP and do your compile from there.
Ain't technology grand?
