Display-less computing

On 12/12/2015 6:11 PM, Eric Christopherson wrote: I think that's a very inviting question for those of us who view those years with a good bit of fond nostalgia! The first ones I personally encountered all read and punched 80-column cards. Some read and wrote to physically rather huge disk drives which could store all of 5MB, but most of them read and wrote 7-track 1/2" wide magnetic tape. The "display" was a line printer. These were strictly business systems used to maintain the needed data for insurance companies, banks, General Services Administration, and a local daily newspaper. Later, rather more interesting ones to me, read and punched 1" wide paper tape. Their primary output was to 1/2" magnetic tape, and their operator consoles were an I/O Selectric typewriter. Some of them also had line printers. They were more interesting to me because they were interfaced to optical character readers, and their main role was to control certain parameters in the OCR system but mostly to receive the characters which were read and write them to the mag tape. The mag tapes were further processed on much larger computer systems as desired by the customers. All text, no graphics at all. Well, I did once write a graph plotting program that could plot data to a line printer. It could even plot multiple graphs overlaid, and kept the curves separated by using a different text character for each input data set. That was fun. :-) Please note that I did change the subject on you so folks would know this is not part of the abominable thread. Later, Charlie C.