Teletype
More info
- Creator
- Teletype Corporation
- Released
- 1963 (model ASR-33)
- Type
- Printing terminal
- Speed
- 10 characters per second
The electromechanical typewriter wired to the computer — still haunting every Unix system through the abbreviation tty.
Teletype Corporation's model ASR-33 of 1963 was effectively the standard terminal for much of the 1960s and 70s. It printed ten characters a second onto a paper roll, had a built-in paper tape reader and punch, and let the user type commands rather than punch cards. Many people met time-sharing for the first time through one of these in a school room.
The legacy is still visible. Writing a newline as carriage return plus line feed comes from the print head needing time to travel back; control characters like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-D are the teletype's signalling; and Unix calls its terminal devices tty — short for teletype — long after the last machine was scrapped.