They weren't the only ones. In the 1970s I worked for Tymshare, a pioneering timesharing company. In a way, we were the "cloud computing" of the day, but with no local compute at all.
Just Teletype machines and then "glass teletypes": a CRT terminal that merely mimicked a Teletype with scrolling text, but with the disadvantage that if something scrolled off the screen you couldn't reach behind it and pull up the pile of paper to look at your old code. It was gone.
They were quiet though.
Later I discovered a "programmable terminal" in a side office/storage room that no one used. It might have been a Datapoint 2200 or something similar. Whatever it was, it had a processor and a character mode screen buffer that you could address directly.
Naturally, I immediately wrote Conway's Game of Life for it in assembly language.
When my manager saw this, he was fairly gentle: "Mike, that must have been fun to program. But we have business needs. Can you please forget about this useless machine and get back to work?"
I had more success with another programmable terminal: a Texas Instruments DS990/1. I found this in the back room of our Texas office, after I flew down to design and implement our usual Teletype "print a question, you type in the answer" interface. Then I saw that I could put the entire UI on an interactive screen, and stayed up all night implementing it.
Our sales team and customers loved it, so this one made us some money.
Not long after that, we hired Douglas Engelbart. Yes, that Douglas Engelbart.
Obviously, someone in the company had taken an interest in what Doug was doing, but he never got any resources to build his vision of the future.
I worked in the same building and often walked by his corner cubicle. With my own interest in more human-oriented interfaces, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I'd introduced myself. But I was a shy young geek and walked on by.
Sometimes it's just the wrong place, at the wrong time.
i remember tymnet! their local dial-up pops fueled a lot of the commercial information services (compuserve, genie, prodigy, aol) that were popular in the 80s and 90s.
Just Teletype machines and then "glass teletypes": a CRT terminal that merely mimicked a Teletype with scrolling text, but with the disadvantage that if something scrolled off the screen you couldn't reach behind it and pull up the pile of paper to look at your old code. It was gone.
They were quiet though.
Later I discovered a "programmable terminal" in a side office/storage room that no one used. It might have been a Datapoint 2200 or something similar. Whatever it was, it had a processor and a character mode screen buffer that you could address directly.
Naturally, I immediately wrote Conway's Game of Life for it in assembly language.
When my manager saw this, he was fairly gentle: "Mike, that must have been fun to program. But we have business needs. Can you please forget about this useless machine and get back to work?"
I had more success with another programmable terminal: a Texas Instruments DS990/1. I found this in the back room of our Texas office, after I flew down to design and implement our usual Teletype "print a question, you type in the answer" interface. Then I saw that I could put the entire UI on an interactive screen, and stayed up all night implementing it.
Our sales team and customers loved it, so this one made us some money.
Not long after that, we hired Douglas Engelbart. Yes, that Douglas Engelbart.
Obviously, someone in the company had taken an interest in what Doug was doing, but he never got any resources to build his vision of the future.
I worked in the same building and often walked by his corner cubicle. With my own interest in more human-oriented interfaces, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I'd introduced myself. But I was a shy young geek and walked on by.
Sometimes it's just the wrong place, at the wrong time.