4/12/2005: A piece of Philadelphia ISP history

[wolf]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

I also remember thinking that we had entered a brave new world of technology when you could also get monitors in amber, and not just green.

We used to fight over the black and white CRTs. There were two at West Chester State College.

The green monitor was the really fancy one. It was connected to a 1200 baud modem!! It was actually a vector graphic display device, and only those schooled in it's arcane ways knew where the sweet spot was that you had to punch when the text started getting wobbly on the display.

One day, one of the computer center staff got a new terminal. It was amazing. Not only did it have a green text display, it was hard-wired into the mainframe so there was no wait-time for a modem to connect. And, to top it all off, it had a (ooooh) floating keyboard. You could sit with the keyboard on your lap with your feet up on his desk and type in a semi-reclined position (If you broke into his office at night, that is).

Hah! We would so laugh at those who were forced to connect with the 300 baud modems on the dot matrix Decwriters!