Marshall:

FYI: I can corroborate the Wikipedia story that if you printed a character immediately after the CR that it appears as a smudge during the carriage return. It's a remarkably clever, but dumb device. I can still imagine the sound of our school's teletype.

Boring story: When I was in High School, my friend Tim came up to me, and says "Hey, Marco! We have a computer at our school!" Needless to say, this was when having a computer at school would be a remarkable thing. Anyway, he leads me to Mr. Lamkin's math class, and shows me the teletype. It turns out that we didn't have a computer at school, but all the schools in the district were issued a teletype, acoustic MODEM and accounts on the timeshare (an HP-2000, if I recall correctly).

There were no computer classes at our school, so when Mr. Lamkin saw that we were interested in it, he gave us accounts on the computer and said we could use it as much as we liked.

We liked quite a lot! So we would often cut other classes to work on the computer in his math class, while he was teaching Trigonometry and Pre-calculus. As the teletype was a noisy beast, he got tired of hearing it during class. But rather than revoking our computer privileges, he got the school to move the teletype to an unused storage room, and gave us access to it there.

A few other guys were interested, and soon afterwards, we had a gang of us teaching ourselves computer programming.

One other fun fact: One of the guys in the group was my boss up until a few months ago.

Ah, well, end of old-man reminiscences...

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.