TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity
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       % got a light?
       No match.
       % man: Why did you get a divorce?
       man:: Too many arguments.
       % make love
       Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.
       % sleep with me
       bad character

                        -- Fun with UNIX, Charlie Gibbs

          Here is a true  story  about a glass  tty: One day an MIT hacker
      was in a motorcycle  accident  and  broke  his  leg.  He had to stay
      in the hospital quite a while, and got restless  because he couldn't
      {hack}. Two of his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for
      it to the  hospital, so that he could use the  computer by telephone
      from his hospital bed.

          Now  this  happened  some  years   before  the  spread  of  home
      computers, and computer  terminals were not a familiar  sight to the
      average  person.  When the two  friends got to the hospital, a guard
      stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They explained  that
      they  wanted to take a computer  terminal to their  friend  who  was
      a patient.

          The  guard  got  out  his  list  of things  that  patients  were
      permitted  to  have in  their  rooms:  TV,  radio,  electric  razor,
      typewriter,  tape  player,  ...  no  computer  terminals.   Computer
      terminals  weren't on the  list, so the  guard  wouldn't  let it in.
      Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was clearly a droid.)

          Fair  enough,  said the two friends, and they left  again.  They
      were frustrated, of course,  because they knew that the terminal was
      as harmless as a TV or anything else on the list...  which gave them
      an idea.

          The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard
      stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said:  "This is
      a TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and
      demonstrated  it. "See? You just  type on the  keyboard and what you
      type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard  didn't stop to think
      about how utterly  useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce
      any paper  copies of what  you  typed;  but  this  was  clearly a TV
      typewriter, no doubt  about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all
      right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"

          [Historical   note:  Many  years  ago,   "Popular   Electronics"
      published  solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the
      essential  uselessness of the  device, it was an enormously  popular
      project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind  "Byte"  magazine's  "Circuit
      Cellar"  feature,  resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the
      early  1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the
      feeling of power the builder  could  achieve by being able to decide
      himself what would be shown on the TV. --ESR]

          [Antihistorical  note: On September  23rd,  1992, the L.A. Times
      ran the following bit of filler:

          Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
      from his first day of school  and excitedly  told his mother  how he
      had written on "a machine  that looks like a computer -- but without
      the TV screen." She asked him if it could have  been a "typewriter."
      "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was called."

          I have since  investigated this matter and determined  that many
      of today's  teenagers  have never seen a slide  rule,  either.... --
      ESR]


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