More Computer Stuff
High School
In 1969 I entered Amityville Memorial High School. One day I *discovered* that
there was a teletype terminal and a 'Mickey Mouse' modem in a room across from the guidence
department office. It was originally setup to dial-out to an information service to pick out
the college your were considering attending and retreive information about it. This was 'GIS',
the Guidence Information System.
I also discovered that there was access to a local time-sharing computer system. LIRICS or
'Long Island Regional Instructional Computer System' available to 'certain students' in the
math department. I made it my mission to become part of that group!
Let's drop back a couple of steps......
Some of the more youthful may not be aware of the equipment just mentioned above:
TELETYPE: Sometimes known as a TTY. The model was an 'ASR33'. It was a LARGE typewriter
type device. It could print up to 8 (EIGHT!) characters per second on a LARGE roll of paper
mounted on a roller on its back. It also was one of those 'souped-up' models with a paper tape
punch and reader mounted on its side. This was how you 'kept' a copy of your program to take
with you, to impress your friends, and to upload back to the remote computer.
'Mickey-Mouse' Modem: Remember your or your Dad's or your GrandPop's black 'Western Electric'
telephone? If it were 'modern', it might have ten (Yes, some did!) or twelve 'touch-tone'
buttons on it or a 'dial'. The important thing was that the 'handset' from *all* of these phones
were *exactly* the same.
The term 'Mickey-Mouse' came from the fact that you did not connect a telephone 'wire' to the modem,
but instead, inserted the handset into two rubber cups on the top of the device and they looked like...
Mickey Mouse's ears, sort of... It used a speaker in one to 'talk' the other remote computer and a
speaker to listen to data from it.
And Back Again...
We would play on the PDP-8 and then the PDP-10 timesharing mainframe
learning BASIC, COBOL or FORTRAN.
We would also wait until after 3PM to sneak on and play 'adventure', the original 'Colossal Cave'
text adventure game! There really were no other 'games' of that magnitude available. Tic-Tac-Toe was
boring before you played it a few times, but 'adventure'...... You could roam the caves looking for
treasures of silver and gold, avoid dwaves (With their 'nasty little knives') and trolls until they threw
us out of the building!!!!
Remember, this was before 1972, the 'Personal Computer' or the web.
We DID however have a type of 'Chat' or 'Instant Messenger'!
It was called 'TALK'. You would type " R talk 'tty#' " and connect to another person.
Until you got the 'feel' of 'how' and 'who' were on the system, you really didn't know
if you were going to 'talk' to another student or be trounced on by an angry teacher!
After a bit of 'snooping' the system, using commom implements ('SYSTAT') found around the
operating system ('TOPS/10') you'd have a better chance of talking to someone you knew.
My Dad and the teachers said the same thing:
"That's not what a computer was designed for!!!!!!!!"
And look what we do today!
I'll write more another time.... This has gone a bit off track...... But it's been fun!!
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