[ih] AT&T, carterfone, the 103, and why didnt BBSs start earlier?

[John Day]

>
>
>my memory is that the B1700, a very interesting machine, had affordable
>comms.  but i do not remember comms for barton's 5500.  algol not ascii!

No Illiac II was had no comm but was very fast with no clock.

There was most definitely data comm on the 5500.   We had probably a 
dozen terminals connected to ours.  We also modified the OS (MCP) to 
support IPC.

Talk about apples and oranges. "Algol not ascii"?  ;-)

Those were the days when ASCII quite sanely had a "left-arrow" 
character that could be used to designate a replacement operator as 
opposed the infinitely ugly ":=" or the just plain wrong typography 
in C and most other languages.  ;-)