IBM 2741 Computer Terminal

To the right of the blackboards at the front of the classroom was a door that led to Mr. Cooper’s office and a storage room. Generally, students were not allowed in the room but there occasionally a student would.  Word had spread among the students that there was a computer terminal in Mr. Cooper’s office.  Now I had read about computers and computer terminals in science fiction books I, so I understood the term, but what actually did the one in Mr. Cooper’s office look like? After expressing interest, Mr. Cooper let several of us go back and see it. There it was, and IBM 2741 Selectric Computer Terminal, [photo] it looked like a typewriter but instead of keys it had a golf ball sized round ball. Well, it was pretty cool, but what made it a computer terminal and not just a typewriter, make it do something, we ask. Mr. Cooper explains that this is not the computer, but it connects to the computer, an IBM Mainframe at the University of Florida, five miles away. Like how cool is that. “Can it talk like HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey?” Someone asks jokingly.  Mr. Cooper laughs and says no but it can communicate with the mainframe and he types in what he explains is command, the little ball dances, spinning around with each letter typed, he hits return, the ball shoots back to the beginning of the next like, like that is sooooo cool, then a few seconds later it goes wild, the little ball dancing across the page, typing letters as it went, zipping back, row after row for a half of a page and we see it printed a picture of the president using different letters of the alphabet.   We were impressed and ask for more, and Mr. Cooper show us a few more things.  Later one of the boys found the command that would print out a three page Playboy Bunny, like the centerfolds in my Playboy magazines that Mom had burned, but in black and white.

My APL typeball for the IBM 2741 terminal

Later I would find out what a unique experience it was.  Mr. Strickland, the teacher we were expecting to teach the class, was the one who arranged with the University to have the terminal installed at our school, it was only one of twelve connected to the university’s mainframe at the time, the other eleven all being on campus, mostly in the computing center.  Mainframes at the time were monolithic beasts, taking up most of a good size room, with the main form of computer interaction being through punched cards for input, and printed paper for output.  The university’s remote computer terminals were some of the very first in the country.  I would get to know them well in the following years, with them influencing the course of my life.

Updated: 10-31-2022

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