On 02/08/2019 05:19 AM, Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
These days people can laugh at the UNIX concept of connecting typewriters but in the lexicon of the 60's the typewriter was the person and the typwriting machine was the compositing device. Gotta love hacker humor tho.
Back when I got into the business, Teletype machines were used for the console. When I first started working for CN Telecommunications (later CNCP & Unitel) I was a bench tech, overhauling Teletypes. A few years later I became a computer tech, working with minicomputers. I spent a lot of time watching long paper tapes running through the tape reader, loading software into the computers. Then, with the VAX 11/780, the console became an LSI-11 computer (microprocessor version of PDP-11), which could be switched between console mode and user terminal, with the STP (Switch Terminal Program) command. The LSI-11 was used for, among other things, loading the VAX microcode from 8" floppies.