Teletypes are such amazing machines. They’re significantly older than computers — I hadn’t realized how much until I looked up Teleprinter on Wikipedia just now and saw that the earliest date back to the 1840s! And Baudot code, a 5-bit alphabet that was widely used before ASCII, was designed for a device built in 1874. (Emile Baudot also gave his name to the unit “baud”, which basically means one bit per second.)
I did use BASIC on an Imsai (Altair clone) with a teletype, but I never had to boot it. I did a few times boot the old PDP-8 in the high school computer lab, which also required a few dozen bytes to be toggled in by hand before it could load its OS from reel-to-reel magnetic tape. This from-nothing exercise is where the word “boot” came from, via “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.” (Apologies if you youngsters already knew that.)
Oh, and apropos of the “who invented the byte?” thread, note that the Altair’s front panel groups the bits in threes, and the boot loader is written down in octal, even though the 8080 is an 8-bit CPU. Old habits died hard.
Well…the really cool kids had a Friden Flexowriter (because of the name, if nothing else), but I have in my day booted CP/M (among other things) from paper tape on an ASR-33 (not mine, regrettably). You could, theoretically, boot it from a punch card reader, but I confess to never actually seeing that done.
Oh, and apropos of the “who invented the byte?” thread, note that the Altair’s front panel groups the bits in threes, and the boot loader is written down in octal, even though the 8080 is an 8-bit CPU. Old habits died hard.
DEC stuff in general did that. Octal is clumsy on an eight-bit-byte machine like a PDP-11, but obviously makes more sense on something six or nine-bit like a PDP-10.
Teletypes are such amazing machines. They’re significantly older than computers — I hadn’t realized how much until I looked up Teleprinter on Wikipedia just now and saw that the earliest date back to the 1840s! And Baudot code, a 5-bit alphabet that was widely used before ASCII, was designed for a device built in 1874. (Emile Baudot also gave his name to the unit “baud”, which basically means one bit per second.)
I did use BASIC on an Imsai (Altair clone) with a teletype, but I never had to boot it. I did a few times boot the old PDP-8 in the high school computer lab, which also required a few dozen bytes to be toggled in by hand before it could load its OS from reel-to-reel magnetic tape. This from-nothing exercise is where the word “boot” came from, via “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.” (Apologies if you youngsters already knew that.)
Oh, and apropos of the “who invented the byte?” thread, note that the Altair’s front panel groups the bits in threes, and the boot loader is written down in octal, even though the 8080 is an 8-bit CPU. Old habits died hard.
Well…the really cool kids had a Friden Flexowriter (because of the name, if nothing else), but I have in my day booted CP/M (among other things) from paper tape on an ASR-33 (not mine, regrettably). You could, theoretically, boot it from a punch card reader, but I confess to never actually seeing that done.
DEC stuff in general did that. Octal is clumsy on an eight-bit-byte machine like a PDP-11, but obviously makes more sense on something six or nine-bit like a PDP-10.