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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="appendixa.html" title="Appendix A. Hacker Folklore"/><link rel="previous" href="meaning-of-hack.html" title="The Meaning of ‘Hack’"/><link rel="next" href="magic-story.html" title="A Story About ‘Magic'"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="meaning-of-hack.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Appendix A. Hacker Folklore</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="magic-story.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="tv-typewriters"/>TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity</h2></div></div><div/></div><p>Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a
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motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital quite a
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while, and got restless because he couldn't <a href="H/hack.html"><i class="glossterm">hack</i></a>. Two
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of his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital,
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so that he could use the computer by telephone from his hospital bed. </p><p>Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and
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computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the
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two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were
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carrying. They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to
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their friend who was a patient.</p><p>The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to
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have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player,
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... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so
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the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was
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clearly a <a href="D/droid.html"><i class="glossterm">droid</i></a>.)</p><p>Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were
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frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as
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a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an idea. </p><p>The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped
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them and asked what they were carrying. They said: “<span class="quote">This is a TV
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typewriter!</span>” The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and
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demonstrated it. “<span class="quote">See? You just type on the keyboard and what you type
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shows up on the TV screen.</span>” Now the guard didn't stop to think about
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how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce any paper copies
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of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt about it.
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So he checked his list: “A TV is all right, a typewriter is all right
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... okay, take it on in!”</p><p>[Historical note: Many years ago, <i class="citetitle">Popular
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Electronics</i> published solder-it-yourself plans for a TV
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typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness of the device, it was an
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enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind
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<i class="citetitle">Byte</i> magazine's “<span class="quote">Circuit Cellar</span>” feature,
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resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed
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its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling of power the builder could
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achieve by being able to decide himself what would be shown on the TV. And, in
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fact, the device was not entirely useless; when combined with a modem board,
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it became a crude but serviceable terminal. —ESR]</p><p>[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the
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following bit in Steve Harvey's ‘Only in L.A.' column:</p><div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>It must have been borrowed from a museum: Solomon Waters of Altadena, a
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6-year-old first-grader, came home from his first day of school and excitedly
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told his mother how he had written on “<span class="quote">a machine that looks like a
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computer--but without the TV screen.</span>”</p><p>She asked him if it could have been a “<span class="quote">typewriter.</span>”</p><p>“<span class="quote">Yeah! Yeah!</span>” he said. “<span class="quote">That's what it was
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called.</span>”</p></blockquote></div><p>I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of
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today's teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either....
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--ESR]</p></div><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="meaning-of-hack.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="appendixa.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="magic-story.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">The Meaning of ‘Hack’ </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> A Story About ‘Magic'</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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