ASR 33 Teletype demo (restoration Part 10)

Our 8-bit ASR 33 Teletype is finally restored. Let's give it a whirl!
ASR 33 Teletype restoration playlist:
• Teletype 33 ASR
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[@jishcatg]

Man, the baud rate dial on the HP terminal is the coolest thing ever.

[@michaeledwards4662]

Brought back memories, I repaired these machines for over 10 years with RCA Service Co. and Western Union.

[@thighdude7]

My Dad worked for Western Union and a Model 33 was my first computer printer, awesome video!

[@digidave3456]

My Dad as well. Worked out of Chicago and Elk Grove village (northwest Illinois) dad sold the message svc. I got to play on them on the weekends sending "Mailgrams" to my friends whose parents thought they had to pay for the letter. I also used the punch tape as kite tales.. 10 years old lol 70s

[@georgeworley6927]

In 1974 I was in the 9th grade and had nothing to do after I ate lunch so I went to my math class to await my 4th period math class. While I was waiting some men brought in a TTY with a 75 baud acoustic coupler on it. A phone and instructions on how to log in. I started playing with it shortly after the crew left I read the instructions and was able to get logged into the computer. I typed chess and it brought up a game of chess and some how I figured out how to move using chess notation. It printed the board after ever move. While I was playing my math teacher walked in and asked me how I was doing what I was doing after watching me for some time. I told him I really didn't know. He allowed me to finish my game {I won one game and the computer won one game. When class started he explained all about the terminal and the HP Timeshared Computer and the computer system that we would be using. We learned how to program in BASIC and Pascal. It was fun times for me. Tried to things that was beyond the scope of the class for extra credit.

[@VallisChristianus]

This is awesome! Back in circa 1974 when I was a junior in Hight School, we had 4 of these attached to a Wang 3300 computer running Basic. I still have all the paper tapes from back then. I am currently in the process of transferring those paper tapes into modern digital formats using a replica of the OP-80A paper tape reader for the Altair 8800. Thank you for this! It brings back a lot of memories!

[@sidewinder666666]

Same here in 1973, though we used acoustic couplers to call a mainframe. If I remember right, it printed a header when it connected which said "Welcome to the T.I.E.S. HP2000 C2 (something-or-other) System". And I may still have a punch tape roll or two, packed away in some dusty long-forgotten box in my house somewhere.

[@suricatakat6476]

Same here, except my experience was in 1979. We actually stored the programs in paper, and we got hold of some mylar tape, which was pretty cool. Anyone remember "Hamurabi"?

[@chap666ish]

We also had a teletype connected via an acoustic coupler to a Univac 1100. Late 1970s. Such memories!

[@jackkraken3888]

Lol Wang.

[@rock-steadi-cam5058]

You know you can read paper tape by eye, just jot down the decimal conversion of the right 7 holes and look-up on an ASCII table... Letters and numbers you won't need to look up after a little while. It's tedious, but try doing that with mag tape or flash memory!

[@chap666ish]

I love the sound that a teletype makes - it brings back memories of school in the late 1970s!

[@dieglhix]

I was born 1989 and love these stuffs

[@technoroom5]

I learned to program in high school back in 1975 on one of these. It had a phone cradle on the right-hand side, with two rubber rings into which the phone receiver would be placed. We would dial a phone number at the local university and connect to an IBM 370 mainframe running BASIC, which could be switched to FORTRAN or PL/I if desired. When it came time to archive our programming assignments, we would use the paper tape. But prior to punching our tape (using the LIST command), we would have to issue the command PUNCH ON command to tell the mainframe to punch a couple "filler" nonprintable characters at the end of each line, so when the tape was read back in, the carriage would have time to return to the start of the next line. Afterward we would enter the command PUNCH OFF. Just hearing those sounds brought back lots of pleasant memories. Thanks so much for making these videos.

[@darrylzurn8932]

I had access to a Teletype in Junior High (9th grade), then in High School we moved to the Digilog terminal and DecWriters for printing. High School even had all the old Keypunch equipment, still used for attendance with punched cards printed on an IBM 402 Accounting Machine. If you think the Teletype was loud and shaky, wait until you saw a sofa-sized accounting machine that had 132 type bars being raised and smashed against ditto-master sprocket forms, one line for each missing student that day.

[@hstrinzel]

WOW, there IS a Bit Bucket! I thought it was just a word. Now seeing it is believing. THANK YOU! Amazing reconstruction work!

[@crunchysuperman]

About 40 years ago, this is how we "saved" programs off our cnc machines. We had a 33 on a roller cart that we could roll over to each machine, and stored the tapes in prescription bottles. We had a whole wall rack of holes to store the bottles in, with the filename written on the caps.

[@__-nd4hf]

Awesome! This machine is a total monstrosity, good job decrypting the hieroglyphics!) Now waiting for Soyuz space clock to be reverse engineered and made functional again.

[@egparker5]

Brings back so many memories - I can almost smell it! Our high school would only splurge for one ribbon and one roll of paper per year. So we would run the paper through four times. And line feed didn’t work, so we had to manually advance the platen. We connected to an HP 2000 - our model 33 had the built in acoustic coupler. I would stay for hours after school until the janitor kicked me out. I later got my own TI silent 700 and a personal account on the HP 2000 (it was the prize for a programming contest sponsored by the time-sharing service). So glad you guys restored the “beast”. Love the channel.

[@roysmith5902]

I had exactly the same experience, right down to the remote HP-2000 at another school a few towns away. We had two ASR-33s. One had the modem for on-line use, the other was just for off-line use. You'd type in your program off-line while the tape punch was on, then take the tape to the other machine and read it in. You could write your own programs in basic, or just waste endless hours playing spacewar, hunt the wumpus, or lunar lander.

[@skibum415]

4:30 I cannot imagine the number of times I've used the phrase “lost in the bit bucket” to infer some form of data was unable to be located while not knowing its historical roots. Thank you so much for this series and for saving a piece of history.

[@portlyoldman]

Learned to program using one of these at university. Was a privilege, most of the guys had to hand punch cards 🤪

[@MarcelHuguenin]

Congratulations Marc, well done. Every time I watch I am amazed by the ingenuity of the people who invented these machines and the ones who years later were able to restore them to their proper working state ;-) Excellent job! Looking forward to your next project.

[@DaiyuHurst]

One historical note. The Control Data 6000 series of mainframes, the first of which was under construction in late 1963, was designed to use a two-tube graphic display console. The Teletype was never used as an operator console. I'm sure there were a few other mainframes that did likewise (eg, IBM who build their own teleprinters, but did not use the Teletype).

[@BradHouser]

My first experience with programming was using these and paying for dial-up BASIC time sharing at $6/hour, which was a lot in the early '70s. To save connect time, we wrote the first version off-line and punched it to paper tape. Then it could be read in at top speed: 10 chars per second! When off-line, typos are fixed with the DEL button, which punched all 8 bits, making it an ignored character.

[@richardgreen1050]

I repaired these for the Air Force and the NSA. Eight bits, five bits and the baud rate was so bad i could type faster than it could take the typing it would jam for the rime it could not except the letter. Five years air Force and three more with Honeywell. What a machine and what a lesson for my future successful time as a technician. But i had to be an engineer at times being a tech was much better... Thanks USAF for your service.

[@TonyLambregts]

I was 4 years old when this was brand new cutting edge technology. Almost too hard to believe thst the device is a direct ancestor of the device I am using to type this message on.

[@ClayMann]

I've always been fascinated by these machines and I feel like I really understand them just a little bit better. Absolutely outstanding job getting what looked beyond repair back into action as good as the day it was made, which was 7 years before I was even born haha Keep on making videos and I'll keep on watching!

[@davefiddes]

Now you can run off copies of Microsoft Basic!

[@CuriousMarc]

You bet. On the to do list.

[@1944GPW]

But but but Bill's 'Open Letter to Hobbyists'! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists I wonder if he still cares :)

[@malcolmbacchus421]

I had a paper tape copy of the Dartmouth BASIC compiler for the Elliott 803 once upon a time. I wonder what happened to it? Still got some program tapes. At odd times I wonder why Microsoft Basic never implemented the matrix functions of good old Dartmouth BASIC. Seemed a retrograde step.

[@1944GPW]

I agree wholeheartedly. I had a book on Dartmouth BASIC long ago, and, wanting to do some simple 3D graphics at the time, really could have done with the MAT ... commands.

[@Membrane556]

@@1944GPW Microsoft released the source code to it and MS-DOS a few years back.

[@gunmatheretrogamer747j]

Greatest repair process ever,you guys did a well job of preserving the old machines and giving chance for young kids like me to discover those fascinating machines

[@TimoNoko]

I tried to save my Diplom Thesis on paper tape in 1978. But government of Finland decided it was too expensive. 100 pages was maybe two rolls of tape and it took 6 hours to punch... Paper tape was not the issue but wear and maintenance costs of the punching device.

[@edwardcasati3374]

Thank you. This episode transported me through a time warp to 45 years ago, where I can see myself sitting in front of an ASR-33 in Mexico City, playing a text version of "Lunar Lander", all printed row by exciting row noisily on to paper. Before ending every session, I would slowly type in a character sequence that would make a human readable paper punch tape for my sweetheart at the time (nerd!).

[@PaulHuininken]

Love it! ♡ Your diagnostic proces is similar to that of a doctor: acting after understanding and before death.

[@5speedfatty]

multiple videos in 24 hours? hell yea, keep em coming marc! after you finish the ASR33 you should restore more things. I'm loving it.

[@jbidinger]

Some of the schools in our district got these machines and we would connect to a timeshare system via acoustic coupler modems. (110 baud?). As students, we weren't given any storage so we had to save our work by "print tape" and I think "load tape" to read them back in again. Eventually they were upgraded to decwriters and 300 baud.

[@jp-hh9xq]

6:40 And we were thrilled with it. The incredible speed!! I can still feel it, also knowing that is was ridiculously slow compared to now.

[@g0bzy]

Very cool. I used to own the Westrex version ARS33 terminal in the 90's! And it still worked. Loved that thing but had to go eventually. Wish i still had it. Nice video, brought back memories.

[@stroudcuster4483]

I started my programming career on one of these connected to HP 2100 machines. I forgot how much of a racket they made. Great to see one of these brought back to life.

[@wizdude]

Great video. Takes me back. I don’t remember any of the teletypes I used having sprocket fed paper, though. It was just continuous toilet paper roll. I didn’t see sprockets until I used the decwriters. Cheers.

[@stachowi]

Wow, this channel is spectacular... i'm 40 and learning about tech before me and I've learned so much from this.

[@Lord-Sméagol]

Old memories! I used one of these at school, dial-up via acoustic coupler to HP 2000F, 9 miles away in London ... I still remember the phone number! [ You still have something to fix: the bell should sound as the carriage is nearing the end of line. ] Sports didn't interest me at school, also, learning a musical instrument didn't grab my enthusiasm. Returning to school after Easter break (age 13), my maths teacher told me that I wouldn't gain anything from the upcoming lessons because I was already good with fractions and percentages, so he sent me to the computer room to 'try it out'. It got my attention immediately, this is what my brain was built for! Programming is like an intellectual Meccano set (I had Meccano from very young). I was in the computer room nearly every break time and after school for about 3 hours until the caretaker came to lock up. One afternoon, in my early days of learning BASIC, I decided to print out the Star Trek program: GET-$STTR1 LIST It took about 1/2 hour, but it was worth it; the program used plenty of BASIC's features, which taught me a lot! [ and a big thanks goes to 'Smurrell' (4 years my senior) for his contributions to my knowledge! ... H713 :) ]

[@rogeratygc7895]

Wow! That takes me back - and reminds me that we used to have a contract to maintain them every six months!

[@antronargaiv3283]

I, too used these. As I left for college, I had acquired a KSR-33, which I used in my dorm room to access the timeshare system. I also got a job at the computer center, repairing them. I stripped them down each summer, re-lubed and tested them, then put them back in the public terminal rooms. They were *technically* 8-bit machines, but only used 6 (or 7, if they had the parity option). No lower case (that was the model 38, and it was no where near as reliable as the 33). They had a ROM drum, activated by the HERE IS button on the keyboard, which you could program to send a short character sequence. I had mine programmed to send my username and password for the mainframe. You "programmed" the drum by breaking off plastic prongs wherever you wanted a "one" bit.

[@lemagreengreen]

Amazing, thank you for these videos. I have never seen a teletype operating in person, long before my time!

[@thewordkeeper]

I remember when I worked in the Radio Shack, no not that one, in the early 1970s as a Radioman in the Navy. Brings back memories of typing out a message then sending the tape to any number of bases. Sometimes the tape would skip a hole punch which would call for us to stop the entire transmission. Then we would have to figure out exactly where the hole was supposed to be and use a hole punch to resend it. If you didn't figure out exactly where the mistake occurred instead of a word reading *_Communications_* it may read out *_Bommunications._*

[@Doctom91]

Excellent work, as always. It was a pleasure to watch this series!

[@PDauto]

just about to start this journey with my ASR33 thanks for the videos guys :)

[@CuriousMarc]

Good luck!

[@RossYoungblood]

Played StarTrek on one of these in high school. Learned BASIC programming. 1977-78.

[@IznbranahlGoose]

I think my first workplace had one of these -- if not it was a very similar model. I remember seeing the process of 'fixing a typo' in a taped message. It involved feeding the old tape through in a kind of 'copy' mode, stopping just before the typo, switching modes so you can enter text directly, then carefully advancing the old tape past the typo, then switching back to 'copy' mode. Sounds like fun.

[@MDBenson]

Great to see the old beastie finally working!

[@mikepeterson9733]

Adding an M to that ASR would bring lots of childhood memories back to me.

[@trueopsimath]

Loved this series. One of these was given to me about 22 years ago. I always dreamed of getting it working, but could never find any information about it. A couple of years ago, when I moved, I decided I would sell it on Ebay to someone who would really appreciate it. In trying to move it so I could take photographs for the listing, I accidentally knocked the damn thing over and it exploded into about a hundred pieces. What a waste! Ah well. After watching this series I can clearly see that I did not have even a tenth of the expertise required to get it working. Thanks for making this series :-)

[@tullyal]

Fantastic series of videos!

[@dougingraham5807]

Nice work guys! The sound these machines make is so distinctive. I found I was missing the smell of the machine oil and the ribbon. If I am not mistaken you can get rid of that column 1 issue by adding another couple of nulls after the linefeed to give it time to finish the return and linefeed operations. I believe we had to send at least 2 in order to get reliable settling.print head and the platen.

[@KaidoFujimi]

Beautiful work. Sounds excellent.

[@ericwright3382]

Keep the videos coming. I love them all!

[@RichterPavel]

Excellent work, Marc!

[@PapasDino]

Another great repair, congratulations!

[@alblgz]

Wow, surprisingly it has the diagonal strike on the capital O, not zero 0, to distinguish them from each other. The later machines had them the other way around.

[@GrumpyTim]

Fantastic video as usual, well done. I SO want one of these - or any Teletype for that matter - maybe one day........

[@numlockkilla]

Congratulations and thank you Mark for keeping alive the great era of invention.

[@DK640OBrianYT]

Deeply fascinated by the TeleType concept. I'd better dig further into the origins. Great restoration, but you knew that already :) Thanks so much for showing the world. Highly appreciated.

[@FlankerTanker]

oh yes and we could save the Bit bucket bits for weddings and party's - thanks for making this video brought back good memories from the past ...

[@peterweingartner4364]

This was a fascinating restoration. It was really interesting to see how they solved problems mechanically that today would be done with a microcontroller. There was a whole different thought process and set of skills involved.

[@chuuni6924]

I thought it was fascinating precisely because I found the thought process surprisingly similar. Sure, if compared to an actual microcontroller it might be one thing, but compared to more hardwired electronics, I thought it was interesting to see how the single motor acts like a centralized clock generator with fanout, and the way in which mechanical linkages act like logic gates. It makes me think how much modern electronics probably owes directly to the engineering practices developed in the mechanical era.

[@warrenmacdonald1372]

The IBM selectric typewriter was an electromechanical descendant of this fascinating part of history. In 1977, in high school grade 13, the school purchased a Digital ( DEC ) PDP-8 computer with a later model of this TeleType - but with the exact same clackity clack sound and printing speed, although the baud rate might have been up to 250 by that time! Great work you've done, thanks for the memories! Looking forward Marc to many more re-qualified projects. You're doing for millennials what ENIAC and UNIVAC did for me and hopefully others of my generation.

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

I remember when in the late 1970s/very early 1980s the Georgia Tech computer center still had some of these in service, as well as keypunches and card readers. I even tried using one -- that thing was hard to type on (at least sort of usable for short periods -- the key punches were even worse).

[@pmacgowan]

I used on of these in 1975-6 at my high school, that’s how I go into IT … argh the memories

[@jupiterapollo4985]

Its crazy to think people used to program on these types of machines back in the day. Each time you wanted to load or create a file/program, it must have taken forever... And the noise! Lord have mercy the noise... The patience of Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson is a godsend.

[@fitrohfajar9141]

as students on this era, i feel so impressed with that machine. nice one.

[@72polara]

Another restoration well done!!!

[@parryhotter7036]

Thank you for this amazing video, i loved your content.

[@MCPicoli]

Brough back memories of visiting the largest newspaper of Brazil many decades ago where there was a large room with maybe 50 or more of those machines, all with small signs on top of them like "Paris", "New York", "Moscow", etc. Most of them were idle, but at any time there was always a few clattering like in the video. Very noisy! Also, they had a pair of those newfangled "fac-simile" machines, very advanced for the time.

[@frequentflyer56]

Bit bucket? Yay!! Confetti!!

[@Kae6502]

Congratulations! \o/ All those little finicky adjustment you had to make to get it up and running! You are such a patient man. And thank you for reminding me - I haven't emptied the Bit Bucket on my computer in long time. That's probably why all these KZbin videos take so long to load! ;)

[@pmcgee003]

That level of confidence (or recklessness) ... doing up the screws to the case *before* the demo. 😊

[@AliasUndercover]

I used one of these in the first programming course I ever took back in 1981. Our teacher was old school even in the old days.

[@tdadyslexia]

I remember these from Commodore Business Machines (CBM) back in 1970s, they had one in Eaglescliffe England, plus a spool to spool mainframe.

[@robertthomas5906]

OMG. I haven't heard that since the early 1980s. Almost 40 years. We had one just like that in our high school. It had the dialer. I stored a bunch of programs off and the next year the CRT you show and the TTY were gone. I had to scrounge up a TTY to read the tape.

[@lenkapenka6976]

At high school (1979) an ASR33 connected to the local university.... fun days!

[@brutusmuerto]

Incredible, thank you!

[@CliveChamberlain946]

Ha! As late as 1988 the Bank of Montreal used this as the main console on a PDP-4 to control diagnostics on 2400/75 baud Racal-Milgo modem equipment. Thanks for a blast from the past!

[@FlankerTanker]

when I started work we had two of these in my office they would be used to punch out tape for PDP 11. this was back in 1970's. we also had the acoustic modem...

[@markpope3426]

I remember these machines when I worked at Western Union. Many running at the same time in the WU office 5th floor and all the traffic they were sending across the country.

[@Techno-Universal]

There were also Teletype machines in the mid 1970s that were actually computers with printers and they had quite a lot of new features including the ability to receive messages and save them to a digital storage format like a tape or floppy disk or you could just print them out! You could also let messages print out in real time or have them appear on the display in real time but there was still a digital character limit that was set by how much RAM the machine had! :)

[@scowell]

At the radio telescope I worked at in the late '70s the TTY was the most-often-broken device... they spent all their time keeping at least one going, connected to the DG Nova mini-computer that ran the data gathering. Also, from my grandfather's office, I believe there's a drum cadence equation that can be run on your Frieden... I'll never forget putting it into an infinite loop and having Grandpa unplug it from the wall!

[@mrz80]

Model railroaders used to use the punch chaff from TTYs and card punches as foliage for O scale trees

[@joed2392]

Dude !!! That is Sooooooo Awesome !!! I kick myself every day for not buying 2 of these for $300 USD, back in 95 !! They were from Western Union, so they had their modems too ! The only thing wrong with them...... The distributors were worn-out ! But as anyone that has done work on the 33's knows, you can make a new pc board distributor pretty easy . Thanks for all of your work !!

[@jadney]

Wow, really great job on a mechanical device of unexpected complexity. The punches in the paper tape seem to leave a wide unused edge on one side. Is that they way they all were, or is that yet another adjustment to be made?

[@CuriousMarc]

You are right! I had not noticed it. Apparently it is never punching the 8th bit which is parity (ASR 33s are really 7-bit machines + parity). I think this is simply because I had set the HP terminal to “no parity”, so it was just sending 7 bit characters with the parity bit always at 0, as requested. If I switch it to send with even or odd parity, the 8th bit should be set sometimes and punch in the remaining margin. I’ll try it out!

[@jadney]

Ah-HAH, I thought it looked like there was room for 1 more bit! ;-) And I even considered pausing the video and trying to count the rows of punches, but I hadn't thought of parity bits. Yes, let's see some tapes with parity and test that 8th row. Okay, if I pause the video I can see that the punched tape format appears to be 3.4, but it should be 3.5. So, yes, that last bit is being ignored.

[@CuriousMarc]

@@jadney Yes you can see in the video the HP parity switch is on None. I just tried it on Even and then Odd, and it punches the 8th bit parity as expected.

[@rlgrlg-oh6cc]

My high school had one of these in the science building connected to a GE time-sharing service. This was in 1971. We learned how to program in Basic on it. One of the demo programs was a horse race, with horses names Citation and Coaltown (famous race horses). You could pick a winner and make a wager. I discovered that the program accepted negative wagers, which added to your holdings if you lost. Too bad it wasn't real money...

[@jp-hh9xq]

OMG I used these! That noise! It's kind of ASMR in a weird way. I heard those noises a lot!

[@ZacLowing]

We had those at Elk Grove High school in Illinois back in 1980ish. I noticed to sign in held the ctl key and nothing printed. So I set up a small program that would wait for the hidden password and then would ring the bell, advance the tape, repeat. I left that program open and left for my next class. Got called back to the class a while later and well, those things held a LOT of yellow tape that was now all over the ground

[@EricFarrowTechnomonk]

Well done ,thank goodness we don't use so many mechanical gadgets ,so much time would be spent adjusting everything, you have way more patience than I have

[@user-dq5xx9hi4q]

The first computer game I ever played that was not in an arcade was playing star trek on one of these terminals at high school, which was linked to a mainframe elsewhere that the school leased time from. A single game too hours due to the slow process of having to type out each screen, a full page, for each move. The next year we got SOL video terminals with 9" black and white screens.

[@woodwaker1]

This was the newest Teletype unit I worked on. Used it on a Computer Microfilm Machine with a Dec PDP-8 in 1973. I think the earliest one was a model 23- used on Crypto gear in the USAF in the 1960's. Quite a marvel at the time

[@richardgreen1050]

The af had teletype, klienschmidt, freeden, and a mixed batch of variants for both crypto and survailance. Very versatile for being 80% mechanical.

[@zetaconvex1987]

I used one of those when I did my computing A levels back in the early 80's.

[@lenevee4925]

Very interesting. I thought fax machines took over the teletype but now I see that this machine was used for several different messages.

[@MilanDupal]

I had typed my basic programs using a teletype machines as well! Nice era.

[@redace001]

Nice Job in the restoration! One burning question I didn't see, was how the punch reader actually turns the hole patterns back into a character. Can you give us a bonus episode on how it decodes? Keep it going! :)

[@nophead]

I think the reader is just 8 switches that connect to the distributor that converts it into a bit steam with a start and stop bits. It doesn't do any decoding , the holes in the tape are just the ASCII code.

[@darrylzurn8932]

@@nophead That's it. As I saw him putting the tape into the reader, I suddenly remembered, 43 years ago, running my finger across the contacts and having the middle sprocket give a little poke!

[@coondogtheman]

So these are the machines you hear in the background of some old radio broadcasts when they are reading the news.

[@user2C47]

I still hear electromechanical teletype machines in the background of some live broadcasts on WGMD. Based on their speed, I would guess that they are from the 1940s.

[@deannascott3475]

This was the first computer terminal I ever used in college in my Freshman year in September 1976 in the science building at Edinboro State College in Edinboro, Pennsylvania.

[@josephgaviota]

I can't believe how many hours I've spent at one of these back in the '70s.

[@chrfit1]

A fantastic example of communication standards, something we lost in the high rate of change in some aspects of modern computing.

[@andie_pants]

Two CuriousMarc videos within a day of each other? It's an embarrassment of riches!

[@andie_pants]

You bet your sweet Telex operator it is.

[@Zerbey]

Great work! I can only assume operators of these things wore earplugs when they were in use or risked hearing damage!

[@Applecompuser]

Amazing!

[@kkpdk]

So, since the puncher is removing zeros from the paper tape, the chad in the bit bucket must be zero bits? So, there are always zero bits in the bit bucket, except when there are no bits in the bit bucket.. I love these mechanical monstrosities, from when mechanical design wasn't afraid of 'slight complexity'..

[@davidmcgill1000]

There would always be the smaller holes for the sprocket wheel.

[@wmlindley]

The punch is adding 1s to the tape. NUL is 0x00 and no bits punched, liked on the leader. RUBOUT (DEL) is 0x7F, all bits set, and all holes punched, and is how you "erase" mistyped characters on tape.

[@nullsmack]

That is so cool. I wasn't around quite as far back as these terminals. I love the chonky sound the machine makes, especially when you are reading the paper tape back. This is the first video of yours I've seen. Please can you tell me if you've talked more about the HP terminal in a previous video? I'm interested in the magnetic cartridge you mentioned at 3:37?

[@CuriousMarc]

Many videos! Here is the playlist on the HP 264X terminals: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h5rOgGONhKZ6jas and the ones about the HP mini cartridge tape drives, which are always a difficult part in a HP restoration: kzbin.info/www/bejne/mYW9dHdqhL14is0

[@nullsmack]

@@CuriousMarc Awesome, Lots of content for me to watch. Thank you :)

[@DevilsHandyman]

When I was a sophomore in high school I went to a place called the Career Enrichment Center in Albuquerque NM. They had a DEC System 10 mainframe and all but a few of the terminals were TTYs. Not sure who made them but they were dot matrix and ran at 110baud. I remember thinking how much paper they wasted as I entered my program and it was printing as I typed then when I wanted a fresh view of my code it would print it all out again. It was a race to see who could use the lone DEC VT100 instead of the TTY!

[@Yrouel86]

If you had a modem could you retrofit it to your machine? It seems that on the right the section is just covered with a panel so perhaps the space is there

[@gbowne1]

The ones I am most familiar with were used to store code for Numerically Controlled metalworking machinery, long before it became CNC.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

My class of signalers for the Swedish (1989-1990) Air Force (Flygvapnet) didnt got teleprinter/paper tape encrypt machine . The one who began in 1988 got it !