There’s a guy on Etsy with a working ASR-33 Teletype, and he’ll make printouts and punched paper tape strips for you. (In Soviet Union, paper tape punches you!)
The ASR-33 is a computer terminal that was common in the 1960s and ’70s, when many boomers were first introduced to computers. It was slow (though we didn’t realize it at the time), noisy, and prone to failure – it was almost entirely mechanical. I’ve long wanted one, but I fear I wouldn’t be able to keep it operational.
But Hugh has one, and he’s learned to maintain it. He’s set up shop on Etsy to sell printouts at a modest cost. I wanted an authentic ASR-33 printout to hang on my wall. But what to get?
Despite the fact that computers were massively expensive, people found plenty of frivolous, wasteful things to do with them. One such thing was to print pictures of Snoopy. I remember my Dad taking me into his work in the 1960s, when I was still in elementary school. I remember the large, bewildering computer. And the system administrator printed out a picture of Snoopy on the line printer (one of those rare devices that was even louder than an ASR-33: it had perhaps 132 rotating print heads, all next to each other, and could print an entire line of text in one very loud stroke).
So I searched through the cobwebs of the web and found an old text picture of Snoopy. Hugh was happy to print it out for me.
To frame it, I used a photo of an ASR-33 as the background mat and added the artist’s signature, as rendered on paper tape.
Here’s the result, hanging on my wall:
