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.
That looks like an IBM PC. I recognize it from my childhood years when the father of a friend (who worked for IBM) had one in the early 80’s. That dude is probably as nerdy as he looks. So not a dumb terminal, it’s one of the first home computers.
Yep, looks about right. The photo to too dark to see the .25" drives but with all those boxes, it’s clear it gets use. I can almost hear that damn dot matrix printer though because I had that model one at home as a kid . That thing was LOUD.
Or the satisfying ka-thunk when you pushed the bar on the floppy drive to lock the disk in place. We had a modified one when I was growing up that had a five MB hard drive.
Yup, I’m almost certain it’s an IBM 5160 series, maybe even a 5162.