Re:Getting Started, circa 1983
by greenyoda on Sunday April 27, 2014 @06:39PM
(#7657294)
"A year or two into this, we were finally upgraded. Amidst much rejoicing, we were provided a handful of IBM 3270 dumb terminals"
Actually, the 3270 terminal was pretty smart for its time. It was capable of x/y cursor addressing (supporting full-screen editors as opposed to line editors like the original Unix "ed"), had protected/unprotected fields (for form entry, you could only enter data in the unprotected fields and tab from one field to the next, like a form in HTML), and one version, the 3279, even had a color display. You can see a photo of a 3279 here:
My first experience with computers in the 1970s was with punched cards, but unlike the author, the output (printed on fan-fold line printer paper) usually came back in a matter of minutes. When your program crashed, you'd get a hexadecimal dump of registers and memory - printed on paper.
Actually, the 3270 terminal was pretty smart for its time. It was capable of x/y cursor addressing (supporting full-screen editors as opposed to line editors like the original Unix "ed"), had protected/unprotected fields (for form entry, you could only enter data in the unprotected fields and tab from one field to the next, like a form in HTML), and one version, the 3279, even had a color display. You can see a photo of a 3279 here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3279
My first experience with computers in the 1970s was with punched cards, but unlike the author, the output (printed on fan-fold line printer paper) usually came back in a matter of minutes. When your program crashed, you'd get a hexadecimal dump of registers and memory - printed on paper.