When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
In government? I suppose someone on Heron Road still knows what they're doing but that just means they'll be the Adeptus Mechanicus.
(Me, I was just there to nanny one of their offices through the trauma of moving a few boxes. Man, if you ever thought working for the tax man was an option, talk to a lifer.)
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time).
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
I had no idea about the teletype.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling fax/modem data connections - becoming less common these days) and you could have those two parts in different countries.
When I was in high school in the late 2000s, one of our math teachers (a woman, by the way) taught the class. She was probably the only teacher to ever teach the class - when she started, they didn't actually have a single computer in the school. Instead, they had time on a mainframe and they somehow entered programs over the phone.
I find it cute how you phrase it like it was magic. They probably had a terminal, smart or dumb, with a modem. (As in an actual make-screechy-noises-into-a-phone-line modem, not a cable modem.) If you recall what a DOS prompt is, imagine one of those except the commands are being run on another machine instead of yours because your machine isn't a computer, it's just a screen, keyboard, and a connection to the phone network. In modern parlance, the thinnest possible thin client.
If it was really vintage the terminal had no screen, just an electromechanical teletype. Instead of printing to a traditional printer on the other end, the TTY would print to a punched-card printer, then some person on the other end set up and fed the punched cards into the mainframe, taking the output cards and feeding them back into a device that read the cards and sent the output back to the teletype in the school. From the students' point of view it'd be like typing a program on a typewriter and then an hour or day later the typewriter prints the result of the program by itself.
Fun IT fact: The Canada Revenue Agency still uses an ancient mainframe/terminal setup to manage the tax system. CRA agents who think they're smart call the program used to access that a "DOS program" but it's actually a terminal emulator. A Windows 7 or 10 computer being used to emulate what's effectively a typewriter with a monitor attached from the 1970's or 1980's.
(None of them know why the program references F13 through F24 to refer to shift-F1 through shift-F12, not even the ones who think they're smart.)
Oh god, at what point do we reach 40k levels of "were not quite sure how it works anymore, only that it does and that we need to appease its machine spirit with burning incense and mono-script chanting?"
In government? I suppose someone on Heron Road still knows what they're doing but that just means they'll be the Adeptus Mechanicus.
(Me, I was just there to nanny one of their offices through the trauma of moving a few boxes. Man, if you ever thought working for the tax man was an option, talk to a lifer.)
I know about phone modems, but I wasn't sure how it worked without a microcomputer (as they were called at the time). I had no idea about the teletype.
Well, think about the old external modems, not the ones that were on a card plugged into the mobo. They were self-contained boxes that plugged into a serial line from the computer on one end and the phone network on the other end. (Or, for real vintage back in the Ma Bell days, an acoustic coupler that plugged into the serial line of a PC on one end and had a spot for your phone handset to sit!) But if you could rig up another device to output the same kind of serial output, it would plug in just fine. And you can get a lot done without a computer - remember that the early arcade games like Pong weren't running on computers, they were dedicated single-purpose electronics. No CPU capable of reading instructions, just logic chips.
Oh, that's a neat corner of history. Not my field of expertise certainly but one of those odd things I'd come across. While Telex didn't use phone lines - at least not at first - it had much of the same basic idea hardware-wise: Dial a number, type, your "typewriter" converts it into something analog that gets sent across the wire, and someone somewhere else sees the output in addition to you. Here's one in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qv5xw4fsh8&feature=youtu.be&t=97
Or, if you take the modem out, here's a teletype hooked straight to a Mark-8, one of the earliest do-it-yourself minicomputers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzPHdoOU8DQ Add in two modems and a phone network (well, a phone network capable of handling fax/modem data connections - becoming less common these days) and you could have those two parts in different countries.
You could also whistle into the phone with a whistle you found in a Captain Crunch box. No seriously, that happened. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/capn-crunch-whistle
And while looking for an article on that, I found Draper got metoo'd in 2017, because of fucking course. https://www.csoonline.com/article/3237591/captain-crunch-aka-john-draper-banned-from-defcon-for-sexual-misconduct.html