Texas Instruments Silent 700

[mmcirvin]

This (or some identical-appearing descendant) was my very first mode of contact with a computer. It's remarkably portable for 1969-vintage information technology, I'd say-- much lighter than an IBM Selectric typewriter, let alone a GE Terminet.

In the mid-seventies, my father would come home after a long day hacking the Honeywell mainframes at the office and hack some more after dinner with his Silent 700, through that 300 baud acoustic coupler (we got a second phone line for the purpose). I had no idea that every kid's dad didn't use a computer all the time. I was living ten or twenty years in the future and didn't know it. There were a few games on the system; it had Original Adventure, tic-tac-toe and Hunt the Wumpus.

Around 1977 or '78 we had a program of once-a-week enrichment courses in school, and I took one on BASIC programming in which we learned everything on paper, since we had no actual computers. At the end of the course, somebody wheeled in a Commodore PET 2001 on a cart and we took turns typing in our little programs and running them. I made a typo and got a syntax error, and then it was somebody else's turn. That evening, my dad dialed in with his terminal and let me run my program on the engineering Honeywells.

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I think I spotted one in a thrift store once, but didn't have the cash for it.

I so wish I'd bought one, especially since it was during that rapidly-disappearing window of time that a 300-baud dedicated terminal might be useful.

[jecook]

Our church had one of those to talk to the phone system.

It got stolen along with a vingtage 128K Mac before we replaced all the windows with plexiglass and installed the alarm system.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

My dad's done computer jobs all my life. Once, as a kid, I got real curious and pressed the F key on the keyboard. Then I went and hid. Because my little kid brain knew that pressing the keys -did- stuff to the computer and I thought maybe I destroyed it somehow by pressing F and Dad won't have a job anymore

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Did it work?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Another thing about that Silent 700: though the model first appeared in 1969, my dad used it up to about 1981 or '82 (when he started using a PC-based terminal program instead, and PCs started eating the time-sharing business's lunch). It never seemed terribly outdated during that whole period; people were still using hulking clattering band-printer terminals at the same time.

I was going to say that this says something about the accelerating pace of technological change, but actually it doesn't. After all, there are certain personal computers and peripherals that remained in fairly wide use for just as long, even when they were technically long obsolete.

It's just that certain devices are good enough-- so well-designed and reliable, so equipped to Just Work-- that they have a really long useful life. This little terminal was definitely one of them, though its age is mostly past (at least in the developed First World; many of these things live on for a much longer time elsewhere).

[jarai.livejournal.com]

TI was very good about updating the Silent 700 line. I've got a model 707 built in 1983. It weighs about as much as a laptop and has similar dimensions with the exception of it being about twice the thickness as a modern laptop. The later 700s supported zippier 1200bps modem speeds.

My understanding is that the the Silent 700s had a popular following with journalists reporting from the field, so I imagine that part of their longevity is owed to the fact that it took until the mid to late 1980s for affordable portable PC alternatives to show up.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Another long-lived machine popular with journalists was the TRS-80 Model 100 (http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=233). It (and its twins marketed under other brand names) was arguably the first popular laptop. There are people still using these. No feature-bloat, just a slab with a good keyboard, a usable display, and a few decent apps.