This is actually very classy and reminds me of my dad's office back in the day. I remember going to his desk on Sundays and listening to dot-matrix printers nearby. Now I know those were ordinary MIS/TPS reports that we've come to hate so much. But I used to play with that line-feed paper, ripping its edges where it connected to the printer sprockets.
There was also a huge drum printer in that office, with a giant spool of paper resting on the false floor. The room was air-conditioned, shoes left outside, very cozy and well lit. Sure it looked very cool to me then. Thank you for bringing back those pleasant memories!
But whenever I think about how prevalent cigarette smoking used to be in those days, I feel sad that so many people smoked without fully understanding the health risks. Both of my grandfathers lived and worked in that era, and both died of lung cancer.
I just re-watched Colossus: The Forbin Project and I thought it was funny how you could tell that the paper was much higher-quality than the stuff I had in my box. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vn0... <- should skip to 36 seconds in
I also deeply hated Brother electronic typewriters, because I could always write faster than those typewriters were able to extract data from buffer. There was always an risk that you filled the buffer up and then had a overflow. Then you had to wait until the buffer was clear so you were able to see what was lost before continuing. Really enraging. IBM Selectic typewriters were much better and a lot faster. Anyway, main point is that print timing differs between letters based on what's being printed.
Of course you were able to connect both of these to computer and use as a printer.
Good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter Bad: http://electricinnards.blogspot.fi/2013/04/brother-ax-250-el...
This should be interesting at least to tech hackers. Old but good stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Selectric.ogv
Please understand that this is not meant to be a full emulation (like, say, Hercules compiled via Emscripten). Otherwise you would have to re-implement Google on top of zOS ... ;-)
Seriously, though, totally impressive!
(my first computer was an Acorn BBC, with 32K and tape recorders to save your programs on, zzzzz...)
I guess I'm a little greedy.
The same author has done PDP-1 Spacewar <http://www.masswerk.at/spacewar/> with a pretty good re-creation of the original display — see Notes on the CRT-Emulation down the page.
Was I that stupid back then? Have a become a much better learner? Was is the "10,000" hours that made the difference?
No. It was just that fucking hard to make much progress back then. And it's changed so gradually that it's hard to notice.
I've have always known this, but I didn't feel it to this extent until I did this demo.
Great job. Brought back wonderful memories. And new understanding.
Now burn it.
Great simulation and highly evocative of that earlier time. Kudos to the creators!
