[TUHS] terminal - just for fun

[John Cowan]

scj at yaccman.com scripsit:

> capital letters, probably because you could
> get legibility with fewer dots that way and didn't have to worry about
> descenders.

According to legend, Teletype's own legibility studies showed the
opposite, that all lower case was far more legible in the presence poor
light, a weak ribbon, dirty paper, and other noise sourcess, but this was
overridden by management on the grounds that it would make it impossible
to spell "God" correctly.  Untrue, but amusing.

> The model 33 Teletypes that were the most common terminal attached to Unix
> in the early days had only a single case, as I recall, being primarily
> used with paper tape with a character set closely related to the character
> set used on punched cards (although with some features that eventually
> become supported in ASCII).  

The model 33 was released in 1963 and was one of the first devices to use
(the 1963 version of) ASCII.  System/360 was originally supposed to use
it, but the effort to make ASCII-compatible printers and card readers
in time for its release was a failure.

The Unix treatment of LF as newline shows, however, that you folks had
model 37 TTYs; the model 33 still required CR+LF for newline.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies!
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.