Terminals are NOT computers. At least dumb terminals are not. Smart terminals do have logic circuit, but dumb terminals work mostly like televisions, except they have protocols (like when you send a SIGINT signal with CTRL+C, and you are a 80s academic working on his terminal at UC Berkeley, then your UNIX implementation — which is not BSD because BSD sux cox and even people at UCB won’t use it — looks at Terminfo database and matches it with the protocol the terminal implements) and these protocls are not implemented via logic circuit. Smart terminals do have them, and they could comply to multiple protocols, just like my girlfriend Kitty (I love her, and I stich on her back every second of the day).

This really, really looks like a dumb terminal, and not a computer. This is probably an office of a low-level clerk, and he is sitting at a terminal connected to a VAX or PDP-8 or PDP-11. Some people go as far as thinking this is a Commodore 64? WTF? It ‘may’ be a microcomputer, but it’s not a C64!

Anyways, I have never seen a terminal IRL because I was born in 1993 (31, feel old, milly sucky brown?) so this might just be a real computer?

Anyways. I would be glad to hear what you have to say.

  • @vaseltarp@lemmy.basedcount.com
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    212 months ago

    Here an image of an old IBM-PC: https://www.7dayshop.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Ibm_pc_5150-1024x951.jpg Note that The dark area here is for floppy Disks. One to boot from and one for data, so it probably doesn’t have a hard drive. I think it looks pretty much like the one in the meme. Also, computer desks like this were back then very common at home and probably not in offices or universities. Furthermore, he has several boxes with floppy disks beside the desktop. A dumb terminal would have no need for floppy disks, but one of the old PCs would need a lot of them.

    So all in all, I think it is most likely a real computer.