Re:Show HN: Joy – a Go to JavaScript compiler
by petecox on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @12:48AM
(#15912320)
Every staff member had one of those. They opened new computer labs at La Trobe in about 1995 but before that it was VTxxx terminals accessing a mixture of VMS or *nix, I believe.
I remember using vi in typesetting a paper with LaTeX before print previewing a DVI on one of the PC or Mac machines.
Re:Show HN: Joy – a Go to JavaScript compiler
by shabbyrobe on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @03:53AM
(#15912985)
Awesome, do you have any more info about them you'd be willing to share? By the time my mate was around they weren't common enough in the humanities dept for him to have ever seen one before Manfred's. He's likely at least as curious as I am!
Re:Show HN: Joy – a Go to JavaScript compiler
by petecox on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @05:19AM
(#15913326)
I was at La Trobe 1992-6 and Manfred taught me in 95 or 96.
I remember a mixture of VMS, Ultrix and I think SunOS. A monochrome screen with curses to do your email, browse gopher and text-only web, compile and run programs (in Manfred's case) and log in from any terminal on campus. There were a couple of monochrome Xterms in the computer centre. But desktop computers had obviously taken over by your friend's era.
"Hello. Tech support? This is Manfred von Thun. My computer is not working."
"OK, no problem, do you have a PC or a Mac?"
"Neither."
<Pause>
"Neither?"
"Yes. Neither."
"Ok, what do you have, then?"
"I have a terminal which connects to the mainframe."
<Pause>
"OK, I'll be right over."
Sure enough, he gets there and there's some godforsaken yellowing text-only terminal thing with a wire plugged into some weird port he'd never seen before, presumably wending its way into the bowels of the university to some long-lost, dusty piece of big iron from computing's distant past.
My mate was incredulous. "So what do you do with this, exactly?"
"I write papers, I write programs, I make web pages."
"Web pages!?"
"Yes, web pages. But I don't believe in graphics."
In spite of his protestations about GUIs, he was eventually given a brand spanking new eMac (this was around about the time he was creating Joy). Once he saw Terminal.app, he no longer seemed particularly concerned.