Hmm, I should send him pictures of the guts of my ASR-33 a "real" teletype, aka tty. :-)<p>And for the record it is much safer to pronounce it 't-t-y' rather than 'titty' as one professor at school was fond of doing. I was in the unfortunate situation of being in a meeting to analyze image data where he said "Ok, everyone grab a titty and lets get to work." Sigh.<p>According to Gordon Bell, one of Digital Equipment's top engineers, originally the consoles that computer companies first built used typewriters from the typewriter companies. Unfortunately the typewriters were found to be unreliable as they were not designed for continual typing. So they took a "cheap" teletype from Teletype corporation (which had made Teletype machines that ran 24/7/365) the model 33 and used that. Even though it was the 'cheap, lightweight' version of a Teletype it was 100x more reliable than the typewriters it replaced. Only IBM stuck with their Selectric typewriters as consoles (but they were the manufacturer of the Selectric so they could beef them up accordingly, and they could change the font with a type ball).