Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker
was in a motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in
the hospital quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't
hack. Two of his friends therefore
took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so that he
could use the computer by telephone from his hospital bed.
Now this happened some years before the spread of home
computers, and computer terminals were not a familiar sight to
the average person. When the two friends got to the hospital, a
guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They
explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their
friend who was a patient.
The guard got out his list of things that patients were
permitted to have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor,
typewriter, tape player, ... no computer
terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard
wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was
clearly a droid.)
Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They
were frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal
was as harmless as a TV or anything else on the
list... which gave them an idea.
The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a
guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said:
"This is a TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they
plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the
keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the
guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter
would be that didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed;
but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt about it. So he
checked his list: "A TV is all right, a typewriter is all right
... okay, take it on in!"
[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics"
published solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite
the essential uselessness of the device, it was an enormously
popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's
"Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his
books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt
correctly) to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by
being able to decide himself what would be shown on the TV.
--ESR]
[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times
ran the following bit in Steve Harvey's `Only in L.A.'
column:
It must have been borrowed from a museum: Solomon
Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home from his
first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he had
written on "a machine that looks like a computer-but without the
TV screen."