Quote:Do you remember an old Canadian SF series called Starlost?You mean, http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/The_Starlost]one of the worst shows ever to be broadcast? I was such a fan when I was ten, I wrote NBC (who broadcast it in the States) a couple of times, and they sent me a few pages xeroxed from the show's bible (which was written by Ben Bova).
And yeah, of course the terminals were like that. Starlost was made on a budget of spit and baling wire, and sometimes the baling wire was too expensive -- they pretty much made do with whatever was handy. (It made the early Doctor Who stuff look like Oscar-winning design by comparison.)
Me? My first computing experiences were with TRS-80 Is back in the late 1970s, along with a timeshared dialup terminal to a mainframe somewhere in NJ. (Funny story, there -- the mainframe system was shared by many high schools, and they ran a programming contest every month. I won the contest one month by writing a very simple dungeon-crawl game in BASIC. Thirty-five years later, my brother-in-law handed me a yellowed printout of the program code -- which had my name in the comments -- and asked if that was me. He'd apparently really liked the game and saved it for his own use once he got his own computer.)
My first personal computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer, which I acquired because a friend in college demonstrated that you could run a version of UNIX (OS-9) on it, and timeshare it -- which he did for himself and his girlfriend. It was always a bit of a laugh to realize that the terminal he ran off the Coco's serial port cost several times as much as the Coco itself. I didn't get my own PC (what they called an IBM-compatible back in those days) until the late 1980s.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.