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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

It you were lucky! (* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo) Good amber glow screens were better compared to the green ones. High (invisible) refresh rates were also "professional" equipment. I worked at home by having the computer connected to the antenna input of the plain small black and white CRT TV. That's 50 Hz refresh of the screen. Interlaced. If you grew up on LCD screens you certainly don't know how 50 Hz refresh feels. And I saved the assembly code to the cassette tape recorder. If I was lucky, if it didn't crash and cause the whole RAM to be wiped out before. And I was lucky that I didn't have to key the sequence in with the switches on the front panel, that I also did earlier (not on this one, but the picture is good: http://www.vintagecomputer.net/MITS/680/altair_680_front_pan...). And that all is even not a joke (as in the video I linked first).

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By the time I was on dial up to a local unix mainframe it was 85 and I had an Amiga and a PC. I actually went and bought a second hand amber screen VT100 work-alike for $50 and started using it all the time because the terminal behavior was rock-solid compared to the emulators available, and the text was very easy on the eyes. Good times.

My first computer that was solely my own was a Compaq Portable III[0], better known as the Compaq Lunchbox. It was a 12 MHz 286 with a whopping 20MB hard drive. It had a gas plasma amber CGA screen (yes it was amber on amber) and a pretty good keyboard for a portable of that vintage. I didn't really use it portable, but it fit nicely on the folding TV tray I used as a desk.

It was an upgrade from using the C64 connected to the TV.

[0] http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/CompaqIIIportable.htm

I tried my hand at programming this one, I think:

http://startup.nmnaturalhistory.org/gallery/item.php?ii=26

You enter the machine code one binary word at a time using the toggle switches on the front panel.

There's a really well done terminal emulator for the Mac, with jitter, refresh latency and screen curve. It can pretty much mimic the VT102 I have connected to my Mac - I use that to tail log files.

http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/

Having had to work on early 80s ttys tends to train you against inefficient keyboard usage. I'll still tend to use history ^substitution^ rather than readline editing at the shell prompt, or avoiding slow sequences in emacs.

Well that is interesting. I started off on a celeron/pentium system so I have no clue how these work. Actually never even came across one of such system in my life. Also since all the old usenet stuff are found on Google Groups, I never even came across this interface before.

If you refer to the picture, it's of Altair "the first home computer," the computer for which Bill Gates wrote his version of BASIC which was practically an OS for that computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_BASIC

Ever heard of the computer bus -- you know the thing that all extension cards connect to -- well on the panels of old computers you were able to see the state of the bus or to change it with the switches. You've actually felt the bits with your hands and saw them on the lights -- you were able to turn on and of each one with the switch.

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