Nice!
2741 was a bit before my time - and the wrong brand. I have clear memories
of using the LA36 Decwriter connected to a timesharing system through a
special phone with 300baud modem. It's on the right here:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/pdp11.html and was OK for a page or two
of output at 30cps - getting multipart reports printed out required a walk
down the road to borrow time on the head office finance department PDP11/70,
with its lineprinter, a fearsome beast indeed:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/lp20.html which sat alongside the
PDP11. Curiously, they trusted me to log in and input my remote job to get
the print out running. Must be because a PDP11 wasn't a real computer.
How times have changed...
--
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Chuck Norcutt
Sent: 10 September 2005 12:21
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] Re: OT: Internet support - was Re: Re: [OT] A sincere apology
-- sort of.
Piers Hemy wrote:
> Go on, it's the weekend already, we aren't in a hurry...
-----------------------------------
I'll tell a short one. It was probably 1969. I had written some production
planning programs and needed to teach our secretary, Candy, to do data entry
on an IBM 2741 typewriter computer terminal.
Candy had never used anything but an ordinary typewriter but the 2741 was
just a fancy Selectric typewriter. The continuous fan-fold paper and pin
feed platen was probably a bit strange to her but she seemed comfortable
with it from the beginning. I started the program and explained how she was
to enter the data. All was going swimmingly until she finished the first
page. At that point the program recognized the end of page and
automatically spaced up to the next one.
At that point, Candy literally leaped up out of her chair and backed well
away from the terminal totally terrified. She started looking all around
her as though some invisible intelligence was watching her and started
crying; "How did it know to do that; how did it know to do that?"
It took quite a while to explain it to her and get her calmed down. We tend
to forget how even simple, common technology wasn't always so.
ps: She was a great typist and went on to enter vast amounts of error-free
data.
Chuck Norcutt
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