TOPS-10 allowed type-ahead, with the caveat that if a program exited with an error, it would intentionally clear the TTY buffer. Something I actually sorely miss.

IIRC, the type-ahead buffer was only around 80 characters. If you exceeded it, it beeped at you ;)

On 9/9/2017 9:04 AM, William Cheswick wrote:

Amen. There were a number of things that really sucked at the time.
My least favorite: time sharing systems that didn’t allow type-ahead.

Kids these days...

On 9Sep 2017, at 12:34 AM, Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com> wrote:

For people used to that world, "echo hello >hi" was literally jaw dropping. Many people had to have it explained twice, because they literally could not conceive of a file being created so easily. I had worked in the computing center for a couple of years, and probably gave more than my share of demos to mainframe users...

Steve