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From: brad@kontron.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.jokes,comp.terminals
Subject: Re: Brain-damaged Terminal Contest
Message-ID: <1202@kontron.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Nov-86 23:35:43 EST
Article-I.D.: kontron.1202
Posted: Sat Nov 22 23:35:43 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Nov-86 00:46:20 EST
References: <1438@kitty.UUCP>
Organization: Kontron Electronics, Mt. View, CA
Lines: 16
Xref: watmath net.jokes:5148 comp.terminals:27

The most brain-damaged terminal of my experience was IBM's 1407 console
typewriter for 1401 systems.  The printer had a 2-color ribbon that sort
of drifted randomly between black and red.  The keyboard was totally
unreliable, and would generate parity errors on perhaps 1 out of every
200 keystrokes when freshly tweaked by a CE, and on 1 out of every 20
keystrokes after a week's use.  The parity errors were deposited into
memory, bringing up a spectacular (by the 1401's modest standards) display
of red error lights, completely nuking the job in progress. (And with
a memory cycle of around 10-11us, and _hydraulic_ seek actuators on those
wonderful 2Mb 1311 disk drives, progress was sloooooooow.)

Let's be fair to the Hazelturkey terminals.  They were among the first
affordable terminals.  By today's standards, they are completely brain-damaged,
but we were damned glad to have them at the time.  On the other hand, they
were terribly unreliable (exceeded in flakiness only, perhaps, by LSI
ADM-1's).