Epilogue (October 2001): Technology moves on. We finally converted control of our computers
to a terminal server which uses a Linux PC as the host. Unfortunately, this meant
it was time to surplus our beloved Televideo terminal.
For your viewing pleasure, we have created this
instructional video
(format: mpg, size: 12.5M) on how we surplus equipment at ISIP.
Many thanks to the High Voltage Laboratory in Mississippi State's Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering for making this video possible.
Enjoy!
Epilogue (May 2001): Click here
to read an editorial from my six-year-old daughter, one of the little Terminal
people shown below, that was written several years after she read this story.
The world through the eyes of a child is an amazing place.
Since I have had to relate this story to people in at least three
continents, I thought I should probably preserve this for posterity.
You might want to hit the "Back" key at this point.
Who Is The Terminal Man?
Our story begins in the late 1970's as a struggling young graduate
student, bound and determined to become an audio analog electronics
designer, is introduced to world of computing. At the time, digital
was being forced down the throats of all undergraduates - "If you want
a job, go digital." Students were often willing recruits because they
could trade courses like Field Theory for Introduction to Computer
Architectures. the latter was a course that had no equations, and
whose final exam consisted of an essay question. Hence, all those
geeks wearing calculators and playing with three bit color and 8 bit
sound on their Commodore computers, including three of the Terminal
Man's best friends, jumped at the chance to avoid a rigorous program of
study.
Sitting in his office at
Illinois Institute of Technology
on a warm summer day, the Terminal Man ran into
Dr. Henry Messinger,
a professor who religiously taught undergraduate electromagnetics, and
was quite famous throughout the campus for bicycling to work in the
middle of winter in Chicago (another story for another time).
Dr. Messinger, wise beyond his years or appearance, told a
disbelieving Terminal Man in 1980 that he would end up in academia.
Dr. Messinger, who knew nothing about digital systems or computers,
convinced this student to do a senior project implementing a digital
filter on a Motorola 6800 (we could handle about nine taps in
real-time back then). Sitting in front of his first real computer
(prior experience was with card punchers and a Univac system), the
spark that started the fire was struck.
The next year, a hotshot young professor from University of Michigan,
Dr. Jack Deller
was recruited to bring new technologies to IIT. He arrived in 1979,
Texas Instruments' (TI) Speak and Spell in hand, spouting catchy
phrases such as Linear Predictive Coding, and talking about new
mathematics that allowed him to identify speech disorders by simply
analyzing someone's voice. The Terminal Man was convinced that
mathematics and computers were really cool, and signal processing was
where the action was, and a Ph.D. was in order.
Shortly thereafter, in 1980, the Terminal Man's major advisor,
Dr. Joe LoCicero
introduced him to the finer arts of speech compression and adaptive
differential encoding. A project was initiated between AT&T Bell
Laboratories, in Naperville, Illinois and IIT to study medium-rate
speech compression algorithms. The Terminal Man was now introduced to
the finer things in life: a TI Silent 700 terminal. This was a marvel
of modern technology - a keyboard with a typewriter and an integrated
300 Baud modem. You might call it the first laptop. It looked more like
a portable typewriter. Research was begun using the Unix editor ed,
and a PDP 11/70 with 64K of memory, and NO virtual memory. The
Terminal Man had his first taste of a home terminal.
The Terminal Man spent several days a week at AT&T. He marveled at
all of the computer and telephone switching hardware. He saw many
types of terminals: terminals with phones, phones with terminals,
terminals with detachable keyboards (HP's were popular), and even
terminals designed solely to do graphics! He thought to himself that
terminals must be pretty important things if Bell Labs has more
terminals than people. At AT&T, he learned many important things,
including this pearl of wisdom from Mike Knudsen (a trombone-playing
M.A. in Music who went on to get a Ph.D. in DSP): a vt100 was a
well-designed terminal because you could stack books on top of it and
they wouldn't fall (other popular terminals had rounded tops).
About this time, the second principal player in this drama enters
the picture. The Terminal Man thought at that time that there
was more to life than terminals, so he got married to his wife
of 16 years,
Mary Ann Picone
(mapicone@isip.msstate.edu - affectionately known in ISIP as "Ma Picone").
She is also known as the Director of Personnel for ISIP because of her
uncanny ability to assess people's personality in five minutes or less.
In the early 1980's, the Terminal Man's wife had a noted aversion to computer
technology - being
the product of a liberal undergraduate education at the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nevertheless, she married the Terminal Man on December 20, 1980,
and moved into their first apartment - two bedrooms and one analog telephone
line.
As this marriage progressed in the early 1980's, it became clear the
Terminal Man needed to work from home. So, with only pennies in hand,
he decided to make his first computer purchase in 1981. After
furiously scouring over many journals and mail order catalogs, he
decided to purchase a
Televideo 910+ for $725 and a
US Robotics
1200 Baud modem for $225. This was state-of-the-art at the time since
the modems had just hit the consumer market.
The USR purchase was particularly intriguing. The Terminal Man,
wanting to save a few dollars in mailing charges, decided to buy the
modem direct from USR. He visited the corporate headquarters of USR,
located in the second floor of a dingy old warehouse in a transitional
neighborhood on Wabash Ave. in Chicago. The modem came in a silver
metal box with no markings on it. It was assembled in the same place,
just down the hallway by non-union factory workers (hard to find in
Chicago). I even saw one of IIT's finest undergraduate students
working on the line when I visited. Needless to say, USR has come a
long way from their early days in Chicago.
This equipment served him well during his Ph.D. studies, though his wife
became increasingly concerned about seeing him hunched over the terminal
at all hours of the day and night mumbling indiscernible phrases
such as "Hilbert transformers" and "lattice synthesizers."
However, he did manage to complete his Ph.D. studies in 1983,
and moved on to a real job in the Speech Research group at
Texas Instruments (TI), under the watchful eye of
George Doddington.
This group had a 1 MIP Vax with 8M of physical memory and a virtual memory
operating system - the Terminal Man was impressed.
At TI, he learned much about serious computing DEC's way - using VAX
clusters, the VMS operating system, DEC terminal servers, and vt100
terminals. There were terminals everywhere - offices, labs,
secretaries desks, and even on managers' desks. In addition, TI
supplied all members of the group with 9600 Baud modems and vt101
terminals for home. So, the USR modem and Televideo terminals were
mothballed. Life at 9600 Baud was nice. Emacs and DCLedit made VMS
almost bearable. We were told this was the fastest modem speed we
could ever use over unconditioned phone lines, so we were content...
The Terminal Man became consumed by his work at TI while his wife
grew increasingly concerned. More MIPS, more Mbytes, more
disk, more speech data, better performance, more MIPS, ... , the
endless cycle had begun. From our one bedroom apartment in North Dallas,
in the wee hours of the morning, a small beacon of light cutting
into the nighttime sky could be seen emanating from their apartment.
Amidst the click-clack of the keyboard and the soft beeps of the terminal,
frantic rumblings about batch jobs, array processors, and
speech display tools could be heard.
His wife, who by this time was feeling particularly neglected because
of this obsession which she didn't understand, walked into the room
one morning around 3 AM and saw her husband furiously programming.
Having just seen the movie
The Terminal Man
with George Segal, she bestowed upon her husband his alias for life:
the Terminal Man. Mind you, this was not said in a complimentary way.
She accused the Terminal Man of being physically attached to his
terminal, and perhaps emotionally attached as well. This alias has
stuck ever since, mainly because of his legendary ability to respond
to email promptly, even at 3 AM. Once, when he used 20,000 units on
his telephone in one month, the local phone company tried to track him
down and reclassify his phone as a business phone.
The story could easily end here, but then you would wonder why he
spent so much time telling this story. Life takes strange and
unpredictable turns. A key turning point in the Terminal Man's
computer life was in 1988, when he experienced his first taste of
windows on his home terminal. This was provided via a
GraphOn serial X terminal
and a 9600
Baud Microcom modem. Since this time, he has traveled around the world
preaching the virtues of this configuration as the ultimate home
terminal. Great performance, no maintenance or system administration
headaches - life was sweet and the Terminal Man was happy. The
Televideo terminal was a distant memory.
Since then, the modems have become faster, the telephone lines have
gone digital, and the software has evolved, but the premise remains
the same. Access from home should be equivalent to access at work. In
fact, because Mississippi lags the nation somewhat in the deployment
of ISDN, the Terminal Man still uses his GraphOn 14s and a USR
Sportster v.34 modem (28.8K Baud).
In 1994, the Terminal Man left Texas Instruments to pursue life in
academia at Mississippi State University, founding the
Institute for Signal and
Information Processing (ISIP).
Here, he began building his latest
computing environment (isip.msstate.edu). To make way for ISIP, a
recently decommissioned Vax 11/780, with lots of serial lines strung
throughout the building, was scrapped. Though the sight of numerous
serial ports stirred fond memories, the Terminal Man attacked the
room, wire cutters in hand, with a vengeance. After pulling up tons
of cable, the new computer room emerged with modern Unix workstations
and a dedicated 10BaseT ethernet.
Being a firm believer in client-server computing, the Terminal Man
purchased headless Sun workstations for the computer room, and X
terminals for the offices. The headless Suns are controlled by a dumb
terminal. Initially, a defective vt100 was deployed. However, when it
came time to replace that terminal, he scrounged the building for a
spare dumb terminal. Mike Hicks, manager of lab facilities at MS
State, led him to a room where the spare terminals were kept. The
door opened, and there they stood - a stack of tvi 910+ terminals.
The Terminal man was moved, he hadn't seen one since 1983. Needless to
say, the ISIP servers are now managed by a tvi 910+ console.
But what about his wife, who has persevered through all these years?
She was given her first real Unix account on ISIP machines in 1995,
and introduced to emacs, netnews, and netscape (essentials for a
fully-connected individual). She now can be seen regularly surfing the
net, and espousing the virtues of Internet access for health care. It
is very common now that she will kick the Terminal Man off of his
terminal at home while he is doing research, to do something more
important (read her NPINFO email). She now receives more mail per day
than all other ISIP users, including the Terminal Man (who is known
for the volume of email he handles). She also has become an Apple
Macintosh fan over the years - she owns an SE-30 with a 19" monitor.
Should we call her the Terminal Lady?
The Terminal Man has also purchased his first laptop computer - a
Gateway Solo
(120 MHz Pentium processor, 1 GByte of disk, and an 800x600 active
matrix screen). Of course, he will put Solaris x86 on it - no Windows
spoken here. Not surprisingly, it was purchased out of a need to do
productive programming on those long vacation drives into the Rocky
Mountains. Someday, he hopes to achieve his dream of doing research
from his laboratory on top of a mountain. His preferred locations are
east the entrance to Yellowstone or the foothills of Kyoto. He has the
name already picked out: the Big Sky Research Institute.
He is also gazing with that sparkle in his eyes at the
big screen PCs
announced by Gateway for use in multimedia applications. His
idea of the ultimate terminal is the 5-story tall screen found at
Disney World, or the 6' x 3' flat screen system found in Sony's
Advanced Technology Exhibit in Tokyo (the latter costs about $1M).
Now, lest you think all this nonsense will stop with this generation,
there are two little Terminal people running around the hallways of
ISIP - a five-year old and a seven-year old. Each sent their first
email message at three and five, respectively. Both are fluent in the
basics of Framemaker and X windows (ok, I am stretching here, but they
can log on and make interesting drawings in Frame). Both have
accounts and email addresses (no web pages yet). The Terminal Man has
insured that his legacy will live on. Of course, since both of these
little ISIP people want to be cowgirls when they grow up, a dynasty of
Terminal descendants is not guaranteed. However, you can never predict
when your life will take a left turn, and a tvi 910+ will be lurking
around the corner.
Joseph Picone
The Terminal Man
October, 1997
