News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by wpietri on Sunday December 10, 2017 @12:23PM (#15892356)
Wow, what a memory rush. I used to color on fanfold line printer paper like this. When I was in kindergarten I'd sometimes go with my dad to work on a weekend when he needed to debug a job. I think those are the exact printer and keypunch models.

I would happily play on the punchcard machines for ages. When you turned one on (with the flip of a heavy switch) they'd start humming, giving a sense of coiled power. I loved the crisp thud of each punch, and the fluffy mass of little squares in the bin that collected waste. Compared with modern computing technology, they have a very industrial feel. I remember being delighted that my last name was all on the top row of the keyboard.

I also remember being absolutely fascinated by insert mode on the terminals. I could make shapes with the symbols and then make them move forward by arrowing back and holding down the spacebar. The slowly fading green glow of the phosphors was magical to me, as was the way each letter was composed of visible dots.

There was a haecceity, a thisness to early tech like this that I miss a little in comparison with the incredibly flexible devices of today. I wouldn't go back, of course, but I definitely get why people spent time maintaining and restoring relics like this.

Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by LeoPanthera on Sunday December 10, 2017 @04:24PM (#15893575)
> The slowly fading green glow of the phosphors was magical to me, as was the way each letter was composed of visible dots.

If you have nostalgia for phosphor, but don't want a huge, hot, CRT in your office, and you have Mac, check out the terminal emulator "Cathode": http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

(No association. I just like the product.) It's extremely configurable, you can simulate a wide variety of tubes in various states of (dis)repair.

Probably the perfect way to play nethack.

Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by Something1234 on Sunday December 10, 2017 @08:40PM (#15894601)
There's another one called "cool retro term" that will run on more operating systems.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by cr0sh on Monday December 11, 2017 @04:56PM (#15900886)
Couple with this font for a true retro feel:

http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/

Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by khedoros1 on Sunday December 10, 2017 @06:31PM (#15894110)
My grandfather worked for IBM before I was born, and there's still a Selectric III typewriter in his office. It's got the same industrial whir from the flywheel that powers the printing head and a similar thud from each impact on the ribbon.

I remember as a young child pounding on the keys to see how fast I could make it go, and later on, writing short stories just to hear the "thunk thunk thunk" (after all, I could've written them on the PC over on the desk, but the typewriter was a novelty).

This was in the 90s, and I recognize that you're probably talking about a couple of decades earlier. I think that the only cardpunch I've touched is the one next to the articles's 1401, at the Computer History Museum, in fact.

Re:Creating a Christmas card on a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe by jacquesm on Sunday December 10, 2017 @03:50PM (#15893425)
That sense of 'coiled power' is not just a sense, there's a fairly beefy flywheel in there somewhere.