When I was a sophomore at Hobart College, I finally took my first programming course. We would attend lectures in a class room and work on our programming assignments in the terminal room. We were instructed to use the hard-copy terminals that were in there. They were like dot matrix printers with keyboards. You'd sit at it, type in your commands, and the computer would respond. It was an insane waste of paper. They were connected to a DEC PDP something-or-other. I saw video terminals, but didn't know if I was allowed to use them or not. Finally I asked the student employee who was working there, and he said that there was no difference between them. I started doing all my programming on the video terminal and used the printer terminals to make a hard-copy listing to turn in to the professor.

The video terminals were DEC VT-100's. I had little to compare them to, except for the tiny bit of hacking I'd done on TRS-80 Model III's in the local Radio Shack. The VT-100 seemed nice to me. One thing I noticed was that the video picture was very crisp. At that time it was nothing more than the alpha-numeric character set, but still it was not the slightest bit fuzzy. The TRS-80 picture wasn't bad, but not nearly as crisp as the VT-100.

I took two more courses using the VT-100's. One was assembly language programming, which reminded me a lot of the programmable calculator I'd used a couple years before. The other was in data structures programming, where we learned about stacks and linked lists and whatnot.

I forget exactly where I got the VT-100 that's pictured above. Working at Cornell, I see a lot of obsolete equipment being thrown away. I somehow managed to save this one from the scrap yard. Unfortunately with nothing to hook it up to there's really no way to tell if it still works or not.