My school got a teletype machine in 1968 that was connected to a time-shared computer in California. This is where I typed up my first program in BASIC (a simple math equation), and later where I wrote the first program of my own: a game of tic-tac-toe. Needless to say, I was hooked.

[-]

JCampenish@reddit

FYI this was posted by the actual Bill Gates. Hey Bill, would you ever consider open sourcing Altair BASIC?

[-]

Actually, yes! You can download it here. It’s not open source in the way we think about it today, but the code is all there. I’ve been thinking about Altair BASIC a lot recently with Microsoft’s 50th anniversary coming up in a few days—I still get a kick out of seeing the original source code, even all these years later.

[-]

Vinylmaster3000@reddit

Apparently the source code is around in a library

[-]

RedditWishIHadnt@reddit

He’s probably played with his fair share of vintage hardware.

[-]

gadget850@reddit

Ours did not have the built-in modem, it used an acoustic coupler. Later, General Electric donated a TermiNet 300 that ran at a blazing 300 baud.

[-]

DaHick@reddit

And I f'ing hated the acoustic couplers. My first one was simplex 300 baud.

There is a reason the "Sneaker Net" standard was developed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

[-]

mrdeworde@reddit

What's the old saying? "Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a cube van of hard drives moving at 100km/h down the highway?"

[-]

NightmareJoker2@reddit

Only issue with the van is packet latency (duration of the trip), the time it takes to fill the buffer (it takes 18 hours to fill an 18TB hard disk, for reference), and the jitter caused by traffic jams. 😅

[-]

gadget850@reddit

And IP over Avian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

[-]

JustaRandoonreddit@reddit

Man, that does remarkably sound similar to the story of Bill Gates...

[-]

RandomJottings@reddit

My first computer experience was in 1979 when my dad got me a TRS-80 Model I. Before that he got me a BASIC programming book, with a photo of a man using the TRS-80 on the cover but the book had been written in the days of Timesharing and remote logging in. The book detailed setting up a teletype and logging on. All I had to do was press a button and there I was, instantly ready to write BASIC programs, but part of my always want to experience the Timesharing of my book. Simpler and happier times.

[-]

mrdeworde@reddit

FWIW, you can set up an IBM running System 360 or one of the other timesharing OSes - the pre-mid-80s ones are mostly public domain, surprisingly - and have at 'er.

[-]

Journeyman-Joe@reddit

I can hear the sound of that ASR-33 in my head!

(We had the same setup. But my first experience was with an IBM 1130, handed down to the high school from the district offices. Fortran IV, on punch cards.)

[-]

BobT21@reddit

Beware the paper tape chaff.

[-]

bsudbrink@reddit

If you want to see and interact with the S-100 bus computers that inspired the personal computer revolution and the creation of Microsoft (Hi thisisbillgates) come to VCF East, April 4th, 5th and 6th. I may bring an ASR-33 but they are darn heavy and a little delicate actually. After 4 hours of bouncing around in the back of a truck they can require a good bit of adjusting to function reliably.

[-]

Procedure_Dunsel@reddit

Clacked away on the modemless version of this hooked up to a PDP8-S as a kid. Never finished that Blackjack program, but was one of only a few who could talk to that refrigerator at all.

[-]

JBYTuna@reddit

Wow! That TTY had a built-in modem. We had an external acoustical coupled modem. TTY’s like this screamed at 10 characters per second.

[-]

cosmictap@reddit

Wow, TIL my first computing experience was on the same hardware as Sir William of Gates!

[-]

GnomesAreGneat@reddit

That's awesome!

[-]

sjclynn@reddit

High school, 1967-1968 had a connection like this. It went to a GE-225 that belonged to Pillsbury in Minneapolis. We were in a suburb.

A couple of years later the consortium that the college that I was attending installed a PDP/8 and we had an ASR-33. on each campus. Amazing what you could do with 4K back in those days.

[-]

Inevitable_Sort6988@reddit

In 1971 at Jr High school in Minnesota I wrote my first BASIC program and was also hooked. The school had a couple ASR33 10 character per second teletypes just like this. Only one connected to the timeshare system which was a UNIVAC 1106. The other was used by students to type up programs on papertape. We would then read in the papertape on connected teletype at a full 10 CPS to load into the timeshare system. The school paid by the connected hour and kids typed pretty slow, so it saved the school money.

[-]

TMWNN@reddit

High school, 1967-1968 had a connection like this. It went to a GE-225 that belonged to Pillsbury in Minneapolis. We were in a suburb.

Your school was among the first to participate in what became MECC.

[-]

sjclynn@reddit

It was Richfield. Graduated and left Minnesota for Kansas. I got hooked too

[-]

bsudbrink@reddit

Waitaminute... "thisisbillgates"... really???

[-]

TrannosaurusRegina@reddit

The account looks legit to me!

Hi Bill!

[-]

LuzRoja29R@reddit

che bil gates tirame unos dolares qvc? unos 10 dolare masomenos porfaaa? es para comprarme una xbox 360 chipeada

[-]

Tech-Junky-1024@reddit

They had a teletype machine in a back corner of the computer room at the company I worked as a computer operator back in the 1980s.

[-]

John_from_ne_il@reddit

I'm so glad I was of the 8-bit era when BASIC was being taught in schools. Kids are missing out.

[-]

Buzz729@reddit

What year was that? In the early '80s, the CS department of my university was decidedly anti-BASIC.

[-]

John_from_ne_il@reddit

Sorry, I should have been specific. Elementary schools. Applesoft BASIC and Integer BASIC, at least in my district in DuPage County, IL. When I got to college, I learned C, then C++. Objective C only existed in NextStep/OpenStep, Java was two years away, and C# was probably just some vague ideas still. Pascal and Fortran were the two other "college" programming languages of choice in engineering and CS.

[-]

Buzz729@reddit

Eww, FORTRAN! My first project out of school was rewriting declassified ICMB targeting routines from FORTRAN to C. (I had learned C in grad school to develop a program to calculate distances and angles in non-Cartesian space). Runtime for a solution dropped from 8-10 hours to 15 minutes. This was for a real time industrial solution calculation.

[-]

John_from_ne_il@reddit

That's pretty frickin cool. I've never really used my programming skills for anything beyond UNIX/Linux command lines (including scripting I picked up later), or modifying the type of games that were typed in from a magazine in the 80s. Most sophisticated things I ever did were demonstrating looks and feels of GUI objects in Java on Macs, Windows, and Linux, so people could see they really are the same, say, menu lists, just shown in the native UI. Oh and I dabbled in making Java apps for Android, but I don't have an original idea for any kind of killer app to save my life. Game programming beyond the 80s style player-missile graphics are way, way beyond me.

[-]

inguz@reddit

My high school also had one, in the early 1980s. It was connected by direct line to a PRIME cluster at a university \~20 miles away.

40 years later, I have a Teletype at home! It's connected to a Linux machine... https://youtu.be/lbmGSmhPSOk

[-]

BeakersBro@reddit

Same TTY in HS in 1975 - connected to HP2000F timeshared BASIC. Wrote two handed spades card game, little rock ID database, and a ton of other programs. In 1976 we got the fancier DecWriter with a higher speed modem.

Kind of amazing what you could do when you are limited in output to what you can print.

[-]

OneOldBear@reddit

Same here and about the same time frame too.

[-]

julioqc@reddit

imagine you're a billionaire and choose not to become batman... shame

[-]

TheRauk@reddit

Thanks for sharing

[-]

Romymopen@reddit

I think my high school had a couple commodore 64's in mid 90's.

Where on Earth did you attend school?

[-]

HardlyRetro@reddit

According to his (Wikipedia entry)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates], this was at Lakeside prep school. There’s a photo from another angle in there of Bill with the same Teletype machine. :-)

[-]

Romymopen@reddit

The rich get richer.

[-]

DaHick@reddit

I actually did something similar at my High school (USA) started learning server programming in parallel to my learning basic & assembly at home (on a trs-80).

Later, I bought a used second trs-80 with the expansion, and the previous owner had moved it to CP/M, so I got to learn that also.

The Sinclair (ZX-1, I think) was a waste of my money, as was the first (4-line LCD) Radioshack portable.

[-]

glencanyon@reddit

I love this picture. I can just feel the excitement.

[-]

weirdal1968@reddit

DECwriter fanboy here. We also had a desktop black and white teletype that I cannot remember much about other than it had a black case, white trim around the keyboard and possibly a row of square black keys along the top row with LEDs for control functions like duplex and parity.

[-]

Laser_Krypton7000@reddit

Take a look at my profile, there is an DECwriter correspondent:-)

[-]

TheSerialHobbyist@reddit

That's a really cool one!

I'd love to get my hands on one of those.

I have a TI Silent 700 that I used for this project: https://youtu.be/eDkJeqvbM9A?si=ifLOE80yVOxegrUi

While it is awesome, it doesn't have quite as much raw sex appeal as the one in your picture.

[-]

Laser_Krypton7000@reddit

Where is the problem - i assume you are US based ? There is an forum - greenkeys for teletypes etc. Should be no problem.

[-]

gadget850@reddit

Guidance counselor had that one for career research.

[-]

quentinnuk@reddit

My school had a Data Dynamics 390, which had the same internals as the ASR 33, but the modem was an external one as in the UK it had to be supplied by the Post Office Telecommunications who ran the UK telephone system. I also started on coding forms and punched cards, and it took a week to get the results because we had to send them off to the nearby university for batch processing. My first language was CESIL and then came BASIC. the first computer was an ICL 1904A I think it had 36k words of core memory and could support 32 time sharing users.

[-]