The existence of pre-existing communications devices isn't disputed.Way before computers, there were serial terminals such as re-purposed teletype machines. 110 baud if memory serves!
You haven't lived until you've played Star Trek on a teletype.
I am not equating the two! I was merely thinking about computing as it was in the 70's and particularly networking via acoustic modems and pathetically slow baud rates.
I played Chess hosted on a university computer located in the U.K. via ARPAnet, the precursor to the original Internet, and no telephone handsets were involved. That was 1976 using a terminal in the EE department of Purdue University.
I know..no handsets involved..for the mainframes..PDN used modems
You might know it by x.25 or x.75 connections in the ancient days
Personal computers or home computers were not the original tool. This was especially true of the Vic-20 with its 22 column text mode.
You lost me...i was talking how the original Internet connected all the mainframes back in the 70s..no fiber existed..
I'm talking about offering up Wargames or Wierd Science as examples of the state of computer telecommunications in their day.
Nobody said that ARPANET started life on fiber. Your's is the first mention of fiber (and ARPANET) which doesn't have anything to do with dialup which is what the Vic20 could do nor was it a requirement for Usenet (an early example of social media).
No
Yup; we used those hooked up to a PDP-20 with CORE memory and a ridiculously dinky disk of a capacity I no longer remember. And that PDP-20 didn't boot off disk! We toggled in the bootstrap loader using the front panel, and "dos" was read in via that stupid paper tape reader on the side.Long before the Vic-20 and Apple ][ were CRT-based terminals from Hazeltine, Televideo and teletypes like the ubiquitous Teletype Model 33.
I was working with punch cards on a 60 bit mainframe as an everyday tool before Wargames debuted. Don't assume.
Ah yes. Must have been a CDC something or other. I used one of those as well to analyze data off my 50 reel-to-reel magtapes. I had to get a genius who knew that CDC to write me an assembler program to convert my 32- and 64-bit floating point words to that odd 60 bit word size. And it was big endian, too, whereas the PDP-20 was little endian like a PC and ARM.
I'm betting you're actually thinking of a PDP-8. The PDP-20 was relabeled as the DECStation 20 before release.
This is my memory of the PDP-8. One of my classmates could actually paddle in the bootstrap from memory!And that PDP-20 didn't boot off disk! We toggled in the bootstrap loader using the front panel, and "dos" was read in via that stupid paper tape reader on the side.
