TI Silent 703 Terminal - Texas Instruments’ slick answer to clunky Teletypes

The Silent 703 Terminal was TI’s slick answer to traditional mechanical Teletypes. And ours is not only very silent, but it appears to be a screamer.

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[SheeplessNW]

God, this reminded me of how many hours I spent on "RS232 gymnastics" back in the 80s and 90s. It's fun to watch someone else do that now, but I really don't miss having to do it for work.

[marcelhh]

This one is probably modified by AT&T for tier 5ESS PABX systems. I vaguely remember to see them even with the brown suitcase. They where used to program these PABX systems.

[DavidHembrow]

It's amusing that AT&T were still buying and using these into the 1990s. I worked for EO, a company part owned by AT&T, and we were developing the first smartphone (or at least one of several contenders for that title) a couple of years before this teletype was built. So for a short time you could buy both a smartphone and a teletype with AT&T branding.
If you can find an EO 440 or 880 (same thing but bigger) I think it'd be an interesting device to make a video of.

[zincfive]

I freaking love this series, where Marc and his friends have restored of the old teletypes through to these "modern" digital interfaces. I studied in University in the era of this transition, we accessed mainframes with teleprinters against 300 baud modems where we strapped a phone handset into a cradle with a velcro, programmed with ibm punch cards, outputted to paper and punch tape. Our first crt's were little more than line printers, operated much like this machine, but with a 40 line x 80 character display. The first microprocessor we programmed was a 8080 with a hexadecimal keypad and 8 character lcd, we outputted paper punch tape from punch cards containing our assembly code . Our project was to simulate a traffic light controller, timed to display green yellow and red lights in each direction represented by the segments of the 8 characters, and if you pushed certain buttons on the keypad, it simulated hitting the "walk" button.

We learned and threw around terms like baud, ebdic, ascii to describe our technology, but until Marc's rebuild, I never understood the connection between semaphore signals which were sent within eyesight, morse code and today's internet. I learned from Marc, and It's amazing, there is a direct line between the Morse code and the telegraph (1830s's around when electricity was first harnessed to send electrical disturbances along direct current wires laid next to railways) at first to signal train traffic, to the teletype which were open dc circuits across a switching network which grew world wide, to the first digital computers, to today's age and "The Internet."

[jensgoerke]

ASR wasn't a name, but the description of the capabilities: Automatic Send/Receive, the ones without the paper tape were designated KSR - Keyboard Send/Receive. Teletype also offered a Receive Only variant, designated RO.

[zorka]

Back in the eighties, I worked for a credit bureau organization where our branch offices in the region used these and we provided support remotely. Ours were not AT&T but specifically Texas Instruments running at 1200 baud. Obviously, for us at that time, these were first class machines for our needs. Great little devices!

[seedschi]

When you showed the wiring in your notebook, I thought "Hm, looks like a Null Mod..." - and there you are!

[repatch]

You have WAY to many toys that each would make us jealous!

[graemedavidson]

I used to fix one of these for a local Ford dealer, the thermal print head would wear out. It was used in the repair dept so that may explain why!

[nicolek]

If you're really interested in silent printers, you could do worse than look at the Olivetti JP101 spark jet printer. Yes, it printed by burning the paper with a tiny spark. Very silent, but no keyboard. I had one for while to go with my Olivetti M10 laptop. It was pretty fast, very light and never caused a fire. It used normal paper on a roll, no thermal coating. I liked it, but them it was free to me, I worked for Olivetti at the time. All this beggaring about with bit rates and parity certainly takes me back a long way - experience told me that you had a speed problem when I saw those FFs and FEs on the protctol analyser.

[gerryjamesedwards]

20:00 I do believe that modern health and safety practices would require anyone working in an office full of the old teletype machines to wear hearing protection. You can see why Ti made a big deal out of their silent version.

[edgeeffect]

We were always trying to push from 9600 baud to 1.92K so this 300/1200 situation is pure nostalgia for me.... I miss RS232... those were the days.

[PL-VA]

Marc - at some point, your videos will be shown at tech-school history lessons - to explain "how did we get here". Your adventures teaches so much more than reading about our old tech from the 60s and forward - and seeing someone respecting these devices (machines?), knowing how to take care of them, how they were used and bringing them back to life, is a much better teaching foundation than old dusty books. I hope you make your manuals and equipment all available at the Computer History Museum as one day I would love to browse the actual thing for real.

[bhtooefr]

I have this variant as well - the AT&T System Administration Terminal. Interestingly, the manual makes no mention of the baud rate, from what I can see. However, given that the intent was that you'd use it with an AT&T System 25 PBX*, which ran at 1200, I suspect AT&T decided that baud rate was something to not worry about.

And, yes, I ran into the same issue, assuming "oh, it's a Silent 703, it'll be 300!"

(* Not sure if the System 75 or 85 - which became the Definity line - were sold with this, or with other terminals.)

[silverXnoise]

Yes I have already done that!



Keep up the great work, Marc. Your channel is a national treasure.

[palpatinewasright]

Very interesting, you're starting to get into computer history I actually lived through :) I would have been quite excited to get one of these in the early 80s.

[billgaudette]

It's 2:30AM Eastern...CuriousMarc posts...I watch!

[joelongjr.]

Portable back then meant "luggable". I used a Silent 700 in the 80's and early 90's to document ladder logic programming on Allen-Bradley PLC-2 programmable controllers. Allen-Bradley had a dedicated "portable" programming terminal for these controllers, the 1770-T3. Anyone that used one called it "the boat anchor". The manual for the T3 said it was "less than 35 lbs."

[ranke]

I got almost no understanding about what you were doing but seeing you solve a problem like this is like a miracle to me!

[ImmortanJoeCamel]

I was really hoping you'd dump a page of ASCII art or something from the PC to terminal to show us what 1200bps looks like on it!