ubikuberalles' Blog

Wow! A screen! I didn't know you could hook those things up to a monitor! Can you play Hunt the Wumpus? an' Adventure? Can ya'? Can ya'?

Too cool! That brings back memories. (Star Trek that is. I never played it on an Altair, but did on a TRS-80 plenty of times.)

Wow! A screen! I didn't know you could hook those things up to a monitor! Can you play Hunt the Wumpus? an' Adventure? Can ya'? Can ya'?

 

Strictly speaking it's a video terminal: a TTY that uses a video screen instead of an impact printer. The computer sends ASCII characters to the terminal via a serial line. So there is graphics, just not much. 24 lines by 80 columns of characters. And not the fun graphic characters you'd find in a C64 or Atair 800, just regular text. Nevertheless, you can have lots of fun with just text on your computer.

 

Can you play hunt the Wumpus? Yes. I have wumpus on my laptop that I can upload to the Altair. Adventure? I don't know. I don't have any source code to type in and I never played the game on an Altair. If you got a BASIC listing of Adventure I'll gladly port the program over to the Altair.

What vintage terminal is that? And do you have a teletype or hardcopy terminal anywhere? Yeah I know they're bulky, but it would help show the history of computing.

 

BTW, a lot of people don't know that ASCII wasn't invented to have anything to do with computing. It was invented for purposes of sending messages via teletype. Real computers used punched cards and a character set derived from them (EBCDIC).

 

It's funny. Microprocessors and teletypes weren't designed for computing, but they both turned out to have very major roles in the field. Although teletypes seem primitive as a user interface, they were far more interactive than punched cards and line printers. Someone's idea of sticking a teletype with a microcomputer set the model for things to come.

Uihjah... I think as a child I played an ASCII version of Star Trek like that one too. I just don't remember which system it was. My dad was having a computer at home for some kind of work when I was some 5 or 6 years old. I think it possibly was a Commodore machine with built in monitor from the PET series, yet I'm not sure which model. Something like that, only I think ours possibly had a cassette drive built-in:

What vintage terminal is that?

 

It's a Lear-Siegler ADM 5 which is a later version of the famous ADM 3a "dumb terminal". The ADM 3a was the first affordable "quality" video terminal (80 characters per line while other cheap video terminals had only 40 characters per line). It came out in 1977 and had cost $1000 in kit form and $1200 assembled. I remember that it was a big deal back then. It was all the talk in computer magazines at the time and it was a significant improvement over the other options: slow teletype terminals that hobbyists usually salvaged from surplus stores or flea markets or cheap printers built from kits that printed really slow and didn't print more than 40 characters per line. The ADM 3a was also very fast: it could go up to 9600 baud while teletypes usually couldn't go faster than 300 Baud (many could only run at 110 Baud!). Not long after the ADM 3a came out, Digital came out with the VT100 which soon dominated the market. There were video cards out there in those days but they had limited resolution (the CROMEMCO TV Dazzler, a very popular video card for the Altair, had only 128X128 resolution).

 

 

And do you have a teletype or hardcopy terminal anywhere? Yeah I know they're bulky, but it would help show the history of computing.

 

No I don't. Back in 1975 my dad bought this huge dot matrix printer/terminal and he used it when he got the Altair in 1976. I acqired his Altair sometime in the early 1980's and I did not want that behemoth printer (my dad also had a Selectric typewriter hooked up as a printer but he sold it before I got the Altair). Nowadays, if I want a hardcopy of something from my Altair I just use my HP laser printer. Normally I connect to the Altair via PC and I just cut and paste and print from my PC. To me it's all about the computer and not the peripherals and so I'm not interested in an old hardcopy terminal. Actually, I take that back. An ASR teletype with a built in tape reader or a Digital DECWriter would be cool to own.

possibly was a Commodore machine with built in monitor from the PET series, yet I'm not sure which model. Something like that, only I think ours possibly had a cassette drive built-in:

Probably a PET 2001. The high school I went to in the early 80s had one of those and a bunch of the later PET that didn't have the built in tape drive. I preferred to use the later as the keyboard was much nicer, plus the screen was bigger. Most of the PETs where 40 column, though I recall one was upgraded for 80 column. We also had an old hamburger shaped radio that was hacked to plug into the IEEE 488 port. A number of games, like space invaders would generate sound effects via the IEEE 488.