Perhaps my favorite video on YouTube is this glorious footage of someone hooking a 1930s teletype up to a computer running Linux:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE
Watching it for the first time is what finally made ed click for me.
And yes, I was disappointed that the author clearly didn't understand why ed has the UI it does. It's about the teletype, not the computational cost of having a WYSIWIG UI.
I desperately want to set up a teletype on my modern desktop - there’s just something so awesome about electromechanical interfaces with a lot more mechanical than electro.
Agreed. I have some mechanically-minded young sons who I'm hoping to introduce to computing by way of a teletype of some sort.
Yeah that video is all kinds of amazing. I also got lost down a several hour rabbit hole watching the guy and his buddies bring up an AGC and perform a simulated lunar landing with it. Thank you for sharing!
That video is amazing!
Re:How Did Vim Become So Popular?
by reaperducer on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @06:57PM
(#23695771)
Or the display might be a single line of 16-segment LEDs for interacting with the machine, and "output" was on paper. Another reason to keep the visuals to a minimum.
> ed
Ed is the standard text editor!
> Having that thing show up on computers in those days was pretty tricky, and some considered it a resource hog.
Well in the 60's and 70's, you didn't necessarily even have a display, you might be using a physical teletype. `ed` is built for that.
Even when you had a display, it could be slow. The VT05 from 1970, only went up to 2400 baud. And if you were using a modem back then I think you were definitely most likely connected at 300 baud or below.