On Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 9:11 AM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.
Shades of the jerq terminal. The J prefix persiste in the code long
after the nickname was quashed.
Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of
ATT hardware. We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone
equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the
button down until it twanged. Just like putting an old 303 modem into
loop back). We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in the
New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a pipe burst
and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s. I chortled in that
unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power switch.
Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.
When I worked for The Wollongong Group, we had a 3b2, 3b5 and 3b20 for all
the networking products we had. The 3b20 was nice. The 3b5 wasn't
terrible.... the 3b2 was the only machine I've seen that I could visibly
see the characters appear one at a time over the telnet session for some,
but not all, programs. Those programs, iirc, used stdio, but the stdio on
the 3b2 didn't have buffering turned on...
Warner