[GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[James Knott]

On 02/08/2019 05:19 AM, Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
> These days people can laugh at the UNIX concept of connecting
> typewriters but in the lexicon of the 60's the typewriter was the
> person and the typwriting machine was the compositing device. Gotta
> love hacker humor tho. 

Back when I got into the business, Teletype machines were used for the
console.  When I first started working for CN Telecommunications (later
CNCP & Unitel) I was a bench tech, overhauling Teletypes.  A few years
later I became a computer tech, working with minicomputers.  I spent a
lot of time watching long paper tapes running through the tape reader,
loading software into the computers.  Then, with the VAX 11/780, the
console became an LSI-11 computer (microprocessor version of PDP-11),
which could be switched between console mode and user terminal, with the
STP (Switch Terminal Program) command.  The LSI-11 was used for, among
other things, loading the VAX microcode from 8" floppies.