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Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

You could put a terminal on an H8 and not have to use the hexpad. Lot's of people built one from the TV Typewriter Cookbook by Don Lancaster (or one of the similar designs floating around then). Knew several folks with that setup.

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https://archive.org/details/tvtcb_doc

WUT, I had no idea. That’s cool!

It wasn't hugely useful unless you also bought/built some sort of mass storage. Fortunately, Heathkit sold a paper tape reader! And a cassette tape interface! And something new and expensive called a 'floppy disk', but who could ever use that much storage?

In the same era (age 7-12) I went to school on an airbase in Germany and at some point “they” (no idea who) decided I should not do normal math, but should instead spend time with the Airmen who ran the computers. They had an Interdata-something-16 minicomputer which had both punched tape and teletype I/O. I played Oregon Trail on the teletype and always died of dysintery. I once asked the wise and aged Airman (he was probably 25), “can I punch my own holes in the tape and make the computer do cool things?” To which he responded “Yes. No.”

Around the same age, I went to a 'gifted student program' as well, and they had a Teletype connected to the school systems mainframe (pretty sure a Univac 1100, but it was a long, long time ago) by an 110 baud, rotary dial modem. The nice thing, was this particular model of Teletype had a paper tape punch as well as a reader, so we could sorta 'save our work'. We had a Star Trek game (very popular) and wrote some (very rudimentary) Fortran programs that once in a blue moon compiled and ran (the teachers didn't know much more than we did, and the documentation was minimal). It was still pretty amazing.

Fun fact...the Interdata 8/32 ended up being pretty significant to Unix history down the line.

"Yes. No.". I had that conversation with adults when I was that age a couple of times. :-)

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